A German travel companion

Round two.

I drove down on Easter Sunday to our soon to be domicile. A 1417km sojourn smashed out in 13hrs. I like to round it up and say its a thousand miles. But it really isn’t. But maybe I’m all about hyperbole. I mean that is the (social media) zeitgeist isn’t it?

We had to stop regularly to pee (and thereby declare our territorial control along our route). These are important considerations. But mostly my travel buddy slept and domination of on-route phenomena was left to me. It’s a lot of pressure for someone who can’t just choke it off at will. So really, post-simian Joey isn’t great at this.

Ostensibly this round happened because I have trepidation about the Movers touching my stuff. Well… my Lego, board games, music and books. And so I loaded up with (only) the essentials.

Which left zero room for clothes (and also food¹). Which I’m now regretting… because in my infinite wisdom I only packed one pair of long pants. A pair of camouflage cargoes which I actually went back for and threw in as an afterthought.

[1] I ate MacDonald’s yesterday… and the gut damage and psychological damage has been palpable.

Having lived in the hinterlands all my life… my idea of autumn weather is something around 25C all day, every day, for two weeks at a time. In fact, weather, and its various permutations have never featured in my thoughts as something that you might need to prepare for.

Enter the Western Cape, which feels the need to demonstrate its tempestuousness in twelve hour bursts, just to underscore that I won’t be in Kansas anymore.

Yesterday for example. It started off with a thick mist rolling in off the ocean, bumping up against the mountain and sitting there. Then it started to rain. After that the wind came rollicking in. For a while it was cloudy and cold and then by lunch time the sun had won whatever aerial combat was going on overhead and it turned into a really nice day…

My nephews are around. So we went swimming.

This pool is near my house. Although pool is a bit of misnomer since its open to the ocean, but with enough interceding rocks to make it calm, even at high tide. Historically, the farmer who owned this land before modernity (and purchasing restrictions) blew it out with dynamite one low tide many moons ago and bears his name.

The German decided to swim out to me (I don’t know exactly what her plan was) but she was clearly concerned about whatever was going on in the water and felt the need to intercede. Had to guide her back to the ramp.