We are back! A big hi to all y’all and thanks for following the AdriftOverland blog. Keep the comments coming – even if we are slow to approve them (sometimes we are long away from wifi when your comments come in.) Posting will be/has been sporadic – moving north toward Entosha involves mostly wild camping.

There’s a glitch on the blogsite – when clicking on a small photo, you are taken off the blog. Sorry about that. Don’t know quite what to do, I’ve tried reloading photos but that did not work. Perhaps on this next post that problem will go away. Word Press has a way of doing that. Maybe it is fixed already, haha.

Three+ months on the road. Luck is still with us. Jesus is with us as well, as we say Jesus, look at that!! several times a day. Here in Windhoek – which is a lovely city – UrbanCamp is our home, a great campsite in the heart of town. Never mind the armed guards and the rolls of razor wire on the top and on the bottom of the fence. The camp is staffed with friendly people and there’s good service. Fellow American travelers from Portland, Oregon, Jared and Jen, meet us at the bar one night and bring friends Paul and Julie. Our paths may cross again, it is hoped.

With some free time in Windhoek while the truck is serviced, we head for the National Botanical Garden. Namibia trees and plants are fantastical, and this is the place to learn more about them. The Garden has been established since the ’70s and has excellent interpretative signage which helps since it seems each tree’s name ends in “thorn”. The Namib desert climate has sustained the Welwitschias which are odd enough, but the many species of bottle trees are even more eye-catching. Their leaves are thick and waxy and the way their bark peels off the greenish trunks is so cool – and they are huge, as you can see Jim inside of this one.

The Baobabs look a tree turned upside down and Namibia has many species of these – gigantic landscape features. The Windhoek Aloe plants at the Garden are all dead, flattened like fallen chess pieces. Turns out four years ago there was a glut of rain and the aloes couldn’t handle it. They must have been spectacular. No sign of them coming back, the staff told us.

Rain is coming down as we leave and it pours for hours. If you ask five people about the rain, you’ll get  five different answers: Yes, it is the rainy season. No, this is highly unusual. Yes, it always rains on Easter (this from a fellow camper). No, we have never seen rain like this. . . like Mark Twain said, everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.