I woke up two times Monday night wondering where the heck I was – and where the heck E was, since he wasn't in bed next to me – and once at dawn in a panic, thinking I had missed a flight to … somewhere.

I guess that’s only to be expected, since Saturday and Sunday were like this: take a cab to the train station, take a train to the airport, wait for a plane, fly to another airport, take a cab to the hotel, crash, get up, take a cab to yet another airport to catch another plane to the airport here, get a cab home.

The Bamako airport was not as bad as I’d been dreading it would be. For one thing, they let us walk from the plane instead of taking that silly bus. But it was still about 100 degrees Fahrenheit inside the terminal, and the passport control line moved so slowly I could have cried, if not for the charming man in front of me carrying a hobby-horse for his daughter, and I had to say no no no no no NO to hotels and guided tours, and the porters kept banging their trolleys into my ankles as I struggled to get my suitcase onto the conveyor belt, and I got in two shouting matches, one with a belligerent porter, the second with a taxi driver whose cab was not regulation yellow.

If you know me, you know it’s bad when I get in a shouting match.

Nonetheless: it’s good to be home. I feel like I’ve been gone forever. The first afternoon in Paris, when we sat in a sidewalk café off a big boulevard and ate lunch, Bamako felt a million miles away. It’s hard to believe this chaotic, hardscrabble country of mud-brick buildings exists so close to a land with sidewalks and huge stores and beautiful architecture and large, green parks and clean, clean air.

Trip recap & photos coming soon.