Family Safari - the highlight of our African Experience

We had an amazing time on our family safari to Kenya this summer. I've been at a loss of how to condense into a single post all the cool things we saw and experienced so instead I'll just put a few of our top pics and moments.

At Lake Naivasha we had a walking safari where we got to be amongst the giraffes, zebras, wildebeest, impala, etc. They are such incredible creatures and we could've watched them all day.

A pretty surreal experience we had that definitely got our hearts pumping was to do a boat safari to see so many beautiful birds and monkeys then come up close to the big hippos.

Lake Nakuru was a beautiful place that we felt we had to ourselves since it was a drive to get there. Here's a hyena who came to say hi on our morning drive.

The rhinos are what made the drive really worth it though. The boys kept count and we saw 15 of the amazing creatures. The ones in back here were fighting and the front ones were protecting the group in their defensive position.

The flamingos were beautiful

When we got to the Masai Mara it was an awesome explosion of animals of all varieties. We never tired of seeing the warthogs. Hakuna Mutata

And the zebras were fun to look at too albeit shorter than we were picturing.

The reason we picked Kenya at this time of the year was for the wildebeest migration. There were so many of them. They were like lemmings- if one got spooked and started running then a whole line of them would start running and the stampede would be a mile long.

This one was an amazing find. Dylan thought he caught a glimpse of golden under a tree in the distance so we drove up and sure enough we found a friend with his lunch. King of the beasts right here. We were literally right next to this glorious creature

The elephants were magnificent. They surprisingly stayed pretty hidden in the heat of the day but as the sun went down they came out in all their glory. We loved watching how they looked out for each other and protected the cute baby elephant which was Lucy's favorite.

We watched a whole parade of giraffes coming from the mountains. They just kept coming- 22 of them! Then they did a little dance while frolicking in a london bridges type game.

This picture captures a little better the mystic moment at sunset. It was a beatiful moment I have frozen in my memory

The cheetah is a truly magnificent creature. We enjoyed watching the cheetahs move around at sunrise.

Then our favorite moment of the whole trip was this watching this lioness eat her breakfast while protecting her kill from the vultures, storks, jackal, and hyena. She chased them off many times and it was like a game of kick the can. She turned her head to keep us from getting close and the vultures would hurry and eat before being chased off over and over again. Funny was watching a hyena catch wind of the kill and book it down from the mountain, cruising in to happily chase off the vultures only to see the lioness and drop his head in disappointment realizing he's not the top of the food chain there.

Our driver Mike was great and led us in all our incredible experiences.

We stayed in a couple luxury tents for a glamping experience at Masai Mara. We would watch the monkeys play in the trees and hear the lions roaring at night. There was no fence around this place only masai guards with spears to ward off the big animals.