In the last days of May as my trip was drawing near, I was browsing the forums at the Accurate Reloading website.  One of the forums is set up to be a discussion of each person's travel dates for flights to Africa.  Since I'll be flying out of Dulles airport in Washington, DC, I was interested in reading any topic that dealt with travel from that point of departure.

One of the threads that I read talked about being sure to be on board the South African Airways plane by no later 5:00pm.  This surprised me greatly; I went back to my email and saw that my flight was scheduled to depart at 12:50pm.  I headed over to the South African Airways website and looked up my flight information.  Departure time 5:20pm.

Not knowing what to think about that, I did some searches on the internet to see if anyone had any information about the change in schedule.  I found out that the three hour refueling stopover in Dakar had been removed from the flight, and the trip was now non-stop from Dulles to Johannesburg.  Although I was really glad to see that the flight time would be down to 15 hours instead of the anticipated 18, this gave me a much longer layover in Washington DC, since my flight from Charlotte would get there before 8:00am.

I got in touch with Kathi Klimes at Wild Travel again, and she found a flight that arrived in Dulles at 4:05pm.  I thought that might be cutting things a little tight, so she found me flight arriving at a little before 1:00pm, which would give me just a short wait before check-in time at South African.  Deciding to go this way, I sent her a note telling her it looked good, and she quickly updated my itinerary for me.