We had thought about the trip for...

We had thought about the trip for a while but when it came down to it, we had one month to plan, because we decided Sept. 1 that we were just going to go.

We said we would leave a month from that day, and we left Oct. 2. We bought the Land Rover in England and then drove it all the way down to Spain. We took a ferry from England to France and then from Spain to Morocco.

In Zaire, there’s a mountainous area in the rain forest where there are family groups of gorillas. The trackers go out every day to find the gorillas so they can find them the next day. Otherwise they would completely lose them because the rain forest is so dense.

We were following the track and we weren’t really sure we were on the right track when all of a sudden we came upon them.

They scream these bloodcurdling screams to let you know you’re on top of them. Your first instinct is to turn around and run, but we were told to put our head down and not look them in the eye and not move. At first you can’t really see them. You can just hear the bushes rustling, and then all of a sudden you see them.

We came upon a troop with mothers and babies. The leader was a younger male, a huge, 400-pound gorilla. You must be careful. We sat down next to him very quietly, and he got up and moved and we followed him.

All of a sudden, he just reached out to touch my hair. His hands were massive, these black leathery hands. I thought he was going to crush my head because he easily could have. But he was very gentle, and then he sat back and watched me for a while. You never lose consciousness of the fact that they are wild, unpredictable animals though.

We also celebrated our first wedding anniversary in Africa. We were in the Sahara and we had been driving along a track that a Tuareg nomad had told us about. It was definitely not a tourist area.

The Tuareg men are called the blue men of the Sahara because the blue dye, which is in all of their clothes, eventually rubs off on their skin and they get a blue tint. We stopped at a number of wells and Tuareg encampments along the way and then came upon the chief’s camp.

So we told him the news of what was happening to Tuaregs along the way. We mentioned it was our first wedding anniversary, so he got the children to go find one of the fat goats.

They killed the goat right there and boiled it up and we had goat meat. It was real shoe-leathery tasting, but we were glad for the protein because we had been a month in the desert and we hadn’t had any protein. We had stocked up in Spain and had bought things along the way, but there was nothing for sale in the desert. We had been eating all kinds of dried things like rice, soup, pasta, spaghetti sauce, and potatoes every way we could fix them.

People often ask us what was most dangerous or scariest. The driving was the scariest. In Nigeria, they have two-lane roads with traffic coming in each direction. We would try to pass someone and someone would try to pass us at the same time. So there would be three cars abreast on a two-lane road with cars coming the other direction doing the same thing. We saw some gruesome, fatal car accidents. During the day I’d be OK while I was driving, but at night I would wake up screaming from the stress.

We had a couple of incidents with animals. In Kenya, we were in a game park, and I was sitting on top of the vehicle and Malcolm was outside. You’re not supposed to be out of your vehicle, and the reason why is the animals can be dangerous and unpredictable.

We were watching these elephants play and we thought they were so amusing. I’m still sitting on top of the vehicle and all of a sudden one of the elephants starts to come at us with the ears flaring, and trumpeting. I was so scared I didn’t move. I was afraid if I moved the elephant might whip me off the top of the vehicle.

It turned out it was a mother, and the other elephant that was almost her size was a baby. Once the baby had passed behind the vehicle and gone on to the watering hole, she dropped her trunk and moved off with the baby as well.

We would like to go back to Africa again, though not to do the whole trip again. The trip itself is something anyone can do. It isn’t rocket science. We just sat down and made a to-do list. There’s nothing extraordinary about me, but I made the decision to do something extraordinary with my life.

Nothing exciting is ever going to happen unless you plan and organize. The trip itself was a planned and take-command situation.