Where are the zebras? Where are the giraffes?

I can see elephants and donkeys from my Dulles Airport Hilton Hotel room
To quote Gov. Rick Perry, "Oops!" We arrived at the South African Airways gate at Dulles ready to board and they checked our passports and boarding passes. A mere formality. Then it turned into a nightmare. They wouldn't let Tom board because he didn't have enough blank visa pages in his passport for Zimbabwe and Namibia. I was thunderstruck and quickly burst into tears. I couldn't believe that our Southern Africa Odyssey (as the tour is called) was turning into a Washington DC nightmare. We are not dressed for Washington's cold weather for starters. And it is after 5 on Friday, a federal holiday anyway. No passport offices are open until Monday. And they can't deliver extra passport pages until 5 pm Monday, too late to make Monday's flight to Cape Town. And if we leave Tuesday night we arrive after our group has left for Namibia. What a nightmare. Finally the airline gate woman gives me a passport office address and tells us to be there early Saturday. She said workers have been known to show up for work and will accommodate people like us. If we can do it we can catch the Saturday evening flight and only miss a day of our trip. 

So we are holed up at the Airport Hilton and plan to go to the DC office early tomorrow and hope a worker shows up and will help us.

The clinker to the whole ordeal was that when South African Airways tried to pull our checked bags off the flight, they discovered they were never delivered from our Tampa flight (United). So who knows where they are. 
Best case scenario: passport gets taken care of Saturday in time for 5:40 pm flight to S. Africa and bags are waiting for us in Cape Town. 
If not, we weekend here with no clothes and no cold-weather outerwear. And it's cold here. 
Stay tuned.