Sunday, March 29, 2015

Africa Bound



We're going to Africa!
 
As a lot of folks know (a smaller number that actually read my blog), we will be in Africa in ONE week!  There will be 11 of us going on this endeavor and other than being surrounding by creative and like-minded folks, we all are familiar with each other and most of us are friends.  How great is that?

We'll be traveling abroad to the 'Motherland' to rough it in the wilds for a multi-week adventure to Botswana and the southern part of Africa. After we land in Johannesburg, and check into our hotel, we'll meet up (we all arrive at different times and on different days) with the rest of the group.  On the 6th, we'll say goodbye to our hotel room and actual real beds and meet with our guide and start on our trek to Botswana.  From this point on, we will be camping in the bush with local guides, moving overland across the country to the Central Kalahari desert, see the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, the Okavango Delta, Moremi, Savuti, and many other amazing places where animals abound. We'll all be filling our sketchbooks and notepads full to bursting with all our adventures, thoughts, and scribbles on this fabulous trip.

The group will end their African adventure at Victoria Falls, which is where Edwin and I will split off and go on for another five days just driving around with a guide, camping, exploring, and trying to locate some African wild dogs (an animal and cause close to our hearts).   

We were running a Kickstarter at the beginning of February in order to help subsidize some of the artists' costs to make this trip.  Everyone already paid for their trip in advance, but when you're an artist who's only job is to take commissions to make art for people, well taking time out to go on a trip of this magnitude is very costly.  The goal of the Kickstarter was to earn $3,500 - the cost of producing the book that we'll be making as a momento of our trip.  I'm very thrilled to say that the Kickstarter was a raging success and  was trounced many times over.  We had a total of 415 backers and earned over $31,000.  There were many stretch goals in this process and the book will now be expanded to over 100 pages and be filled with art and stories of our adventures.  All of our backers are going to be receiving their goodies that they pledged for just as soon as we can produce them.

I'm guessing that one of the key hooks for the Kickstarter just could have been that there was only one risk to the book not being published and that was the risk of being dragged away by hungry lions!?! 

Even though the Kickstarter has finished, you can read the write-up about it and what we'll be doing over there by checking out the link below.






Expanding Horizons - Artists' Journey to Africa

Needless to say, we're very excited about the trip and as the date gets closer and closer, very nervous and stressed as well. However, AFRICA!!!!  I just hope that we're able to travel light enough.  We'll have to do a lot of arranging and purging of items, I'm sure.  We can only take bags that weigh less than 26 pounds and need to be soft-sided duffels (allowed two per person to check), one smaller carry on per person, and one personal item.  The 26 pounds (15 kilos), soft-sided duffels are restrictions for the puddle jumper aircraft once over there and for the vehicles we'll be driving around in. Due to the theft problem over there AND in the airports according to reports, we might elect to carry on everything and that would mean only two small under 26 pound duffel bags and two backpacks total to take us through 20 days!

Wish us luck!

1 comment:

  1. That is so awesome that you guys were able to make $31,000! Kickstarter is amazing! I hope you guys have a blast. :)

    ReplyDelete

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