I’d never even been out of the country. I got my passport just for this trip. Of course, the original South Africa trip was planned with Estelle for the most amazing photographic safari of our lives. But life had different plans for me and South Africa. I met Edwin. On a video game, of course. It’s not where you expect to find love, and it’s not somewhere you go to find love either really, especially when your person ends up being at least 8 time zones away. I would have never imagines that the late nights would have led to this. I could have never guessed how drastically one, seemingly inconsequential decision, would have such an impact on the future, would lead to a change in the rest of our lives.
Not only did I find someone who made me feel more like me than I had in my entire life, but I gained an amazing bonus family over the course of that first trip. New cousins, aunts, uncles, sisters, brother. I could not have asked for a better family to become a part of.
Oh, but I did get to have that amazing African safari as well! But that was definitely not my favorite part of the trip, which was a very unexpected twist.
South Africa, 2017, was the beginning of the rest of my life in the best way I could have imagined.