Along the Niger River

The lesson we learned from the following experience was this: never consider driving along a road in which the map designated by a dashed line (showing it is a secondary or tertiary road) unless you have a lot of time, gas, food, and water. So the story begins like this, it was a three day weekend and there were a few of us who knew we wanted to get out of town for at least one day. No one made firm plans. Friday we were busy doing stuff, including just relaxing around the house since it was a busy week. Saturday no one could get up early enough to commit to anything. So then we decided to take a drive down to the Niger River on a Sunday afternoon. The route seemed clear enough. Drive East from Abuja until we came to the town of Agia, then South until we reached Bamko, and then West until we reached Gwagwalada, and then head back North until we arrived in Abuja once again- a nice simple quadrilateral path. The trip took us 12 hours in total, far past our first estimate of 4 hours. It would have been amazing if we had more time to enjoy the wonderful sites that we saw and not have had the stress levels we did- due to time, the sketchy bridges we drove over, and the bouncy road on Gordon's back. We didn't even have time to put a toe into the Niger once we did see it!