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1. Lion- the first morning at the tent camp, we opted to skip breakfast, take boxed lunches and get out to look for wildlife at sunrise. We didn’t go immediately into the Maasai Mara park itself, but just across a small river behind our camp. Right away, there was a family of elephants! The baby was shy, but the others just kind of ignored us. We followed some tracks, not exactly roads, but obviously places where other vehicles had been. I hadn’t spotted much of the wildlife, the Crums had eyes trained to look for them and Kevin is always a great wildlife spotter, but I found the first lion. She was sitting on a little raised mound of dirt and staring intently into the distance. We watched her for a while, and then drove to a spot where we could be closer. I anticipated that animals would leave when they realized you were watching them, but some, like this lion, just pretty much ignore people and vehicles! At that moment I was SO glad we’d gotten the new video camera with the long zoom! After a while, she got up and started walking away. We followed her at a distance and when she settled down, we stopped to watch. She started to roar and eventually another lioness showed up.
They were so beautiful, and since they were active we decided to just stay, eat our peanut butter and jelly sandwich breakfast and see what happened. At one point, Rachel asked her parents if she could get out of the land cruiser and stand in the window on the opposite side of the vehicle from where the lions were. She slipped out the window and then could see over the top. The lioness turned to look at Rachel, licked her lips as if to say, “I could change my breakfast plans you know”, and Rachel slipped right back in.
A while later, the lioness got up and started walking straight at us. She just moved alongside the land cruiser, close enough that if we would have opened the door, we would probably have bumped her with it! They were tracking a wildebeest on the opposite ridge, Paige named him “Wilber” and we were kind of rooting for him to wise up and not come close, but we were also kind of thinking that it would be interesting to watch a kill. One of the lionesses went off into the distance and they roared back and forth for a while. Eventually the other one went off into an area that it would have been hard to follow and we moved on. We found another safari vehicle and we joined them to watch a male and female lion, and later some other lionesses, and while that was neat, the whole encounter with “our lioness” was about the most magical wildlife hour of our trip.
2. Listening to hippos and lions while we slept 
When we traveled to the Maasai Mara area, we stayed in a tent camp called Olare. Finding the camp was an adventure as the “roads” are more like tracks through the grass and the signage consists of a rock now and then painted with a camp name and an arrow if you are lucky.
The tents were on a concrete platform and had complete bathrooms in each tent. The showers were great, but we had to wait until they turned the hot water on at 6:30 pm and the electricity was only on from 7-9:30 pm. The beds were like a 4 poster style with beautiful mosquito nets. The entire camp was surrounded by an electric fence, so the animals are free to roam wherever, but we were caged up. We stayed two nights and the second night, our party of 6 filled up the only 3 tents occupied in the entire camp. There were probably 30 tents total. The food was amazing, quite elaborate meals fixed out in the “middle of nowhere”. The dining tent faced the river and monkeys played in the area right outside, Paige was very creeped out by the monkeys! When we slept, we could hear the animals right outside, some of them were less than 100 yards from our beds. We came to recognize the voices of the hippo, and the lion and even though the elephants were less than ¼ mile away, we weren’t sure we heard them. The night was VERY
dark, and that night we were VERY aware that we were far from home!
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