I woke up quite early in the morning, and started the bath on our room. It is set into the floor and has a stunning view of the dam and mountains so was extremely relaxing and luxurious. We left Dan at home to organise the music for the wedding and I drove mum into Ceres for her 9:00am appointment for a facial and other beauty treatments. Whilst she was busy, I ran errands around town. I dropped off the dirty laundry to be cleaned, which was just R109 for the 8kg's to be washed, tumbled dried and folded. I also organised a wedding cake from a company called @ Function, who charged us R75 for a plain chocolate cake. Much more reasonable than the R600 another woman wanted to charge to make the same thing! Why on earth are wedding cakes so expensive, it is totally ridiculous. I did not mention when I ordered the cake that it was for our wedding, a d we really wanted something very inexpensive and small as we were served dessert by Nick at Olive Rock, so a large cake would have been a bit much.
I also booked more people in for the zip slide later on in the day, and went off to see the wedding flowers. mike had ordered some beautiful flowers, but he had gotten the colour wrong I had wanted red flowers on the five tables and he had ordered white ones, but I didn't tell him that he had made a mistake, as it really didn't matter. I can never understand why brides freak out when something 'goes wrong', just laugh it off and move on, it's about your marriage to the person you love not what colours the flowers are! :)
We stopped back at home and saw Steve, Sharon, Emma and Paul, as they had driven to Arum Lilly fairly early in the morning from Cape Town. I asked Dan and his parents to run the errand of going to get our ID's certified, as Charles needed those at the Rehearsal dinner to be able to legally marry us on Wednesday. They also went to get food for our dinner, which is where we ran into them again, just outside Spar. We took the food in our car as they had parked by Pick and Pay and walked down to Spar, and we also snagged Dan to come with us to meet with Suzanne from Trendy Decor to rent some items from the wedding. She was a little further away than I had originally anticipated so we told the Whiteley's to head to Waverley Hills for lunch and we would meet them for the zip slide when we got back.
Suzanne was wonderful, and she had just what we needed for the wedding. We rented white embossed table cloths for the round tables, two champagne buckets, tea light candle holders, a plate for the cake, round glass mirrors for the centres of the tables, a shutter for the place settings, and a partridge in a pear tree. Ok I'm just kidding about the last part :D We drove back via Wolseley to get fire wood for the evenings at Arum Lilly and for the fire pots at the wedding. As we pulled up near the main street in Wolseley mum and I both spotted a home industries store and yelled to Dan that we would meet hmmm round the corner and jumped out the car. We wanted to order some muffins for breakfast for the morning of the wedding and finger food for lunch, and it was just the perfect place!
Once we returned back to the cottage mum went straight off again in the land rover to fetch dad from the airport. Steve, Sharon, Emma, Dan, Paul and I piled into their two cars and drove off to the zip slide. The zip slide is the longest one in the western cape, and. I was lucky enough to spot a groupon voucher for two or four people that made it half price, so R200 not R400. I had gotten just one voucher of four, and Alice myself and Dan were signed up to use it, and Paul had been interested when I bought it so he and Emma split the cost of the fourth voucher. JD and Charlotte came with Alice from Cape Town, so we were a group of 7. After we checked in and signed our individual indemnity forms we were harnessed up and given a helmet and gloves too.
They drove us for about 10 minutes till they were up next to the start of the zip slide on their private property. The views from up at the top are gorgeous, and luckily Alice was smart enough to bring her camera or we would have no record we actually did the zip slide!! JD went first as no one else wanted too, and the lady hooked his handles onto the cable and explained to him how to hold the bar up till the guy at the end signalled for you to pull down on the handles, thereby breaking yourself. I went next and it was amazing!! I thought I would be quite scared about the height, but as you are basically sitting down in the harness once they hook you onto the cable it feels very comfortable and safe!
Each of the 8 slides is different, the longest one was about 290m and the highest one was over 50m. Their we're ones where we had to break the whole way as they were very fast, and we could stop in the middle of two of them to have a look around. I got caught at the end of that one, the second one, as I had stopped quite late so was unable to create enough momentum for myself to get all the way to the end, so I had to swivel round and pull myself to the end :D We saw baboons whilst we were there, and the views of the entire valley were stunning. Everyone switched round our order on each of the slides, so that the same people were not left behind or always started. The guides were great, very friendly and kind, and they showed us some interesting things like a rock shaped like a dinosaurs head and some bushman paintings!
All seven of us loved the zip slide, and I was rather pleased at myself for looking into doing it and booking it for us as it was an amazing experience! We got back to their reception where we helped out of our harnesses and all chose a drink from the fridge. As we left we were talking about the fact that our wedding guest book in no way resembled a book as it came as individual tags for people to fill in, and as such we needed a tree to tie them on. We decided we didn't want to buy an actual tree so we would just need a branch, and at the moment I spotted a dead looking tree that had very interesting branches on it, so I pulled it straight out of the ground! Paul was not too pleased about it going into his rental car, with good justification, so we tied a jersey round the roots and drove to Spar to buy booze. Alice, JD and Charlotte bought a couple of drinks to bring round to the cabin, as they still had time to relax with us before driving back to Cape Town to sleep.
The rest of us enjoyed a lovely braai cooked by Dan, and sat inside as it was pretty cold. Mum arrived back at about 9pm with Dad, who was annoyed at the rest of the boys for drinking all the beer :D We fed dad left overs from the meal, and sat around the fire chatting and laughing quite late into the evening.
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