Back from South Africa

Ok, it's 7:00 AM and I've been awake for about an hour. I just can't quite get my clock readjusted to California time and I keep waking up for the day between 4:00 and 6:00 AM. We arrived home on Thursday evening at about 6:00 PM. We had been awake for over 48 hours by the time we got to sleep Thursday night. It's a long haul getting to South Africa, and it's made much worse if you can't get to sleep on an airplane... which is my problem. However, I wouldn't trade the experience for the world since it also helped show us what we may want to do differently when we fly to Zambia in a couple of months!

So, I kind of left everyone hanging when we headed out for South Africa. I mentioned in my final post that we were going to be receiving another offer on Monday night, and didn't know how it would pan out. Well, the long and short of it is that the offer was super low, we countered with our BOTTOM line offer, told their realtor we didn't have time to play games and they had to come up to our number or look for another house. Well, they still played the game of countering, coming up another $10,000. On Tuesday, while we were at LAX, our realtor was calling us and trying to get the deal to work out. They'd come to within $10,000 of our number through multiple counters and now it looked like the deal was going to work. Talk about frustrating. We're through security at the airport, less than an hour before leaving for Africa, and now our realtor wants us to find a fax machine in case we could get the numbers to work. Well, I was determined to make it work if I could, so I begged in the VIP airline lounges until I found one that would let me accept and send a fax. Then I waited some more. Kamran (our realtor) called us moments before we needed to board the plane. He said he still had a lot of number crunching to do, and had to talk to their realtor, so he couldn't fax anything yet. THEN, he asked if we could get in touch with him upon our arrival in South Africa. Are you kidding me?! Ugh.

Well, after 2.5 days of flying and a wonderful visit with an old friend during our 8 hour layover in London, we were at our Game Lodge on Zulu Nyala and ready to crash. After a quick dinner and showers, we did just that. We were out within seconds of hitting the pillows. The next morning, however, my curiosity about the deal began to get the better of me. I eventually called my mom from our room at the Lodge (without a calling card... yikes!) to see what had conspired. She let me know they'd made the numbers work, and the first time buyers that had made the offer were too concerned to leave the deal out there hanging until we returned. So, if we wanted to get the house under contract, we had to get some papers faxed to us, signed, and faxed back. Grr. What a pain. It doesn't help having a 9 hour time difference to complicate office hours of our realtor and the lodge office staff.

So, we were able to get the papers faxed and signed, and spent the remainder of our trip trying to forget about the whole thing. We were in AFRICA, who wants to worry about a house back home?! We had a magnificent time, but that's a story for the next post! Right now, it's time for breakfast!