I married Louellen in 1990 and, while I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to adventure, within hours of our nuptials she convinced me to get on a Mexicana Airline flight into a hurricane!  That’s another story, however the pattern has continued these nearly 20 years.

Louellen’s long time dream has been to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, which, at 19,340 feet, is Africa’s highest peak and the world’s tallest freestanding mountain.  I don’t know where this dream came from – I’ll have to ask her sometime – but, on the day after Christmas in 2008, I find myself in Moshi, Tanzania staring at the great mountain from its foothills in this town, which, because of its frequent mists, is named with the Swahili word for smoke.