Hi Craig, thanks again for your helpful info. We've been doing even more reading and think that we've finally decided that we do need to do some flying as you said to save time. We didn't realize how long it takes to travel by car around that area. We're also starting to entertain the idea of only going to Kenya, doing Masai Mara maybe with Lake Nakuru, and also Amboseli. It seems driving to Amboseli wouldn't be too bad if we still needed to drive to one place to keep the budget down. If we do both Kenya and Tanzania, we may cut out the Serengeti since apparently the majority of the animals have gone north to Masai Mara. In that case we'd aim for 4-5 days in Masai Mara flying from/to Nairobi, then take another flight to Arusha to drive visiting Ngorongoro, Lake Manyara and Tarangire with our remaining days. Ignoring the yellow fever vaccination and visa fee requirements to go to Tanzania, would you still recommend sticking only to Kenya and splitting 10 days between Masai Mara/Lake Nakuru and Amboseli perhaps? We definitely want to visit both countries in the long run anyway, but it would probably be a while until we return to Eastern Africa. We travel a lot and have an endless list of places to visit!

I think we are aiming for about $8k total for 10 days for the two of us. So about $400ish/person/day. We definitely don't want to stay at one of the large lodges like Serena from other reading we've been doing.

We initially thought crossing the border would be difficult and time consuming, or require going back to Nairobi, but just learned of the SafariLink option through Isibania that has been around a few years now. http://www.flysafarilink.com/Safaril...a_to_Serengeti Is this what Rose did? Can you provide any more info on this? The price isn't listed on their site, so we are contacting them for details. 11:30am from Mara to Migori, cross the border and then leave for Serengeti destinations by 2pm sure beats 10-12 hours driving. So if this turns out to be a reasonable option, then I think at least one night in the Serengeti might be back on the table.