Epic Adventure -- Day 23 -- 21/09/2012 -- Kenton-on-Sea to PlettenbergBay

The Dunes Lounge Area

Waking up this morning our only task was to pack up the cottage and prepare for our trip to Plettenburg Bay. As with most mornings this trip we awoke at about 7:00 without setting any type of alarm. We knew we had to be out by 10:00 so we slowly roused ourselves and began packing the car. We both decided that, before undertaking a four hour excursion, we should stop in the same breakfast establishment as the morning before to fuel ourselves with gratuitous amounts of caffeine before setting off down the road.

It was at this breakfast spot that we managed to get a huge amount of free wifi that allowed us to catch up on these posts. We sat for about an hour and half using the Internet while we had one drink a piece, a bit cheeky me thinks! While Jenny was uploading some photos to the blog I walked down to spar to get us some ham for sandwiches on the road.

The Dunes Main Bedroom

Once our blog posts were uploaded we decided it was time to get going and so set the sat nav to Plettenbergbaai or Plettenburg Bay, only 325km away. I noticed before we set off that sometime along the road today the car would pass 130,000km, and we would pass 2,000km on our trip odometer. I told Jenny a story about having a road trip book for kids when I was younger that stated when a car passed each 10,000km the driver was to buy everyone a soda (although, much to my amusement I remember reading that phrase as 'the driver must buy everyone a sofa' !?!?) And once the car hit this milage we pulled off at a BP station so I could buy Jenny her requisite drink/furniture.

Once we resumed our driving I was on a mission to make the trip as quickly and as smoothly as possible and so had no intention of stopping for the remaining 240km. Because I have spent the past 4 years in the UK and the previous 18 years in the eastern US I have not experienced many long stretches of empty road, well I have, but not quite this long or this empty. I know South Africa is not the most sparsely populated country but it does have some mighty empty stretches of road and gives you a whole new appreciation for how large a country this really is.

We occupied some of the time by taking about Bill Bryson's book 'Down Under' in which he spends most of the book trying to convey to the reader how large Australia actually is. I told Jenny some of the anecdotes involving scale and I soon came to understand why he writes most of his book on this topic. As we pressed on I noticed something peculiar about our GPS, despite traveling 15km/hr over the speed limit the GPS still had us arriving at 2:16. Soon it became evident that the GPS was not going to tell us the actual arrival time no matter how fast we traveled. I even managed to get the machine to tell us it was going to take 25 minutes to cover the last 28km at 118km/hr!? It probably has something to do with the GPS not being allowed to tell you your ETA if you go over the speed limit.





We arrived at the Dunes Resort just after 2, and checked in. It seems in an RCI resort you need to be given quite a few pieces of paper and part with a deposit before they will give you your key, perhaps because we were basically given a lovely two bedroom house for the week! It is lovely, very well decorated, similar to Dan's parents beach house in the States, and the two double doors downstairs open out onto our own lawn, car port and braai area. We both set to unpacking as soon as we arrived, and in less than half an hour I had all the clothes in the dresser and Dan had all of downstairs sorted. Afterwards we decided to have a wander down to the beach, only a 5 minute walk from our house. The view from the deck the Dunes has built is brilliant, and apparently a great place for whale and dolphin watching, a common sight along these shores. We were not able to see any so we just took a walk on the beach, inspected a weird looking jelly fish and Jenny walked in the sea which is really cold!


After our return to the house Dan started on a bottle of wine, whilst I relaxed in front of the tv. About an hour later (and more than half the bottle!) two ladies came by the house, giggling together, and when they came to the door they asked us if they could please get their ice creams out of the freezer. It turns out that they were the maids who prepared our house that morning and had forgotten their treats here, good thing we hadn't eaten them :D

As we hadn't gone to the shops before arriving, we decided to head to their restaurant for dinner, where Dan had fish and chips and I had a chicken and bacon tosted sandwich. They were both yummy, and so was my fresh pineapple juice. They have a swimming pool outside the bar, and it looked very inviting whilst sitting next to the fire, but it's probably also pretty cold at the moment! Dan was a bit drunk at this stage, after so much wine and a beer so we toodled off home for some more tv and then off to sleep pretty early!