Golden Land

The trip to northern Africa was long but uneventful.  I left Friday night and arrived Sunday afternoon, losing a lot of time in layovers, and even more in time zone migration.

The land is beautiful.  Flying in, it reminded me more of my Mee-my's town in Illinois than anywhere else in America, with wide spaces of land sectioned by a loose grid of small roads.  Unlike Illinois, where there is usually at least one house per large farm area, Africa just has a lot of space.  There were miles of road and flat land with no development at all.  The buildings were clustered in groups of 3-10 houses, with a low wall around them.  There are short walls everywhere here; maybe more walls than houses. 

The most beautiful part about the land is the light that shines from everywhere.  The palette of colors defines new shades of gold - the trees (all of which are 15 feet tall or shorter) are dark green-gold; there are endless fields of white-gold grasses; even the roads are dusted with enough sand to make them dusky gold.

It's beautiful.