Wow!

We drive to our new house, which isn't ready yet, but it looks AMAZING!  This is our front door, we also meet our new neighbors who are a state dept family from New Mexico, they have 3 girls, the youngest is 4 and Charlie's first buddy.  They play spies and he is happy to have a friend, they also have a nice dog, so we can borrow her when we miss our pups! Charlie is thinking about where to put our basketball hoop that we shipped in the middle of the night, he says if we had a pool we could put it in there!

Playground in the middle of the mall and Charlie goes South African kid style and takes off his shoes, most of the kids we see around go barefoot-everywhere!

Greg has the day off so we drive by the girls school- very impressive grounds, and then we go check out the American Embassy, its funny the floor plan of the building looks like an Embassy Suites Hotel-I stayed at many of those in my consulting days.

After lunch at the mall and playground time for Charlie we head to the Rietvlei Nature Reserve which is about 15 minutes away...absolutely incredible!  Here is the sign on the way in...I wanted to have Kelly in the background since a 13 year old sometimes can be dangerous too! (not sure she liked my joke)

We see all kinds of antelope first, then there are a bunch of cars stopped and we see our first RHINO!! Incredible!

We round a corner to some zebra..right up by the road, so quiet you can hear them munching grass!
Charlie names him ZiZi!

We also stop at the picnic area where you are allowed to get out of your car and we hear a strange noise, Kelly says its a hippo and she is right...in the pond we see at least two but we think there are more.  The noises of the birds sound like a recorded CD that you hear at Brookstone- really beautiful.  Katie climbs the big tree, we hope she doesn't fall off over the electric fence and into the water or else she would be on the other side of the scary sign.  (see below)

This is the pond where the hippos live...

We drove out at sunset and found an amazing place that overlooked the whole area with a beautiful deck to enjoy the sunset.  They have a fabulous selection of South African foods on the menu, we plan to go back when we are feeling adventurous.