We woke up at 6, this morning to make sure that we were away with enough time to drop mum off at the airport. We showered and packed the car before driving over to the Holmes house for our last breakfast. It was just as amazing as the previous meals, a delicious bacon and mushroom mix on top of toasted farm bread and sprinkled with cheese, along with tea and juice. What more could you ask for? We got our final puppy cuddles before saying outer goodbyes and climbing into the turquoise steed for the journey to Port Elizabeth airport. The sat nav put our eta at 11am, half an hour later than mum would have wanted to be at the airport for her half 12 flight, but still enough time to get there comfortably. We sang happy birthday to Snolly along the way as she had her 6000th kilometre birthday with us on the trip :D Dan very rightly stated once we registered how far we had driven in Snolly that if (or when!) she dies on us "she's not a car that will die in peacefully in her sleep, she is a car that will fall down the stairs out of a open window off a skyscraper"
Stopping for petrol along the way we happened to hit a station that had an armoured guard at it as they were re cashing the ATM, so it felt really safe! We pulled into the airport with lots of time to get mum checked in, the only hurdle now would be to hopefully get the two bags onto the plane without any issues about weight being made nor her having to repack them! The first bag (which we figured was the lightest) weighed just under 23kgs, the limit for each piece, and the second bag weighed over 26kgs! When the first bag went on I realised that the second would be well over so I started talking to the guy at the desk about how he was and was he having a good day blah blah blah, in the hopes that he would ignore the weight and be nice and let it slide and he did!! See nice people do work at airports!!
We were sad to say goodbye to mum as Dan and I had both wanted her to carry on the trip with us up to Swaziland. Thankfully we will see her and dad again really soon at Victoria falls in December! The two tasks we had to do in PE were go to Dulces and get my favourite ice cream, fudge choc chip, and then go to the land rover garage to get the light fixed. The waterfront where Dulces was was closer time wise to we opted to go there first. We got a comprehensive book about early South African history for Dan, dating from the 1600's to the mid 1900's. As we walked around the corner to ducked it became apparent that there were major refurbishment projects going on on that entire section of sops some was pretty heart broken when I realised there would be no ice cream.
We cheered me up however by finding an arcade to play in! We swapped R20 for some of their coins and proceeded to play a flying pig game, deal or no deal, those coin dropping machines and a duck punching game amongst others! We won 73 tickets, and with that we got three paper airplanes that you assemble and a packet of really rubbish granadilla sherbet. We walked around the waterfront and went to Sweets from heaven, a great sweetie shop where we got a selection of things like teeth, hearts and egg sweets and a packet of Super C's before heading back to the car to go to the mechanic. Koebus in Graafies had recommended Brett from Savoy Motors to diagnose the engine issue for us before we knew it was fixable, so we headed to him to get the light fixed.
He was really helful, he replaced broken light and the old light on the right hand side. The cover on it was a really weird colour, and so we chose to replace it but keep the old one as spare. The piece of bumper that Dan had taken off the day before to fix a piece too Brett re attached for us, but managed to crack it as it was so old! Oops :D Our passenger side window sometimes pops as though it is about to break as the window winds down, but he told us it would be suoer expensive to fix and it should hopefully not break no matter how terrible it actually sounds. The buttons on both keys for Snolly had all been pushed out as they were also quite old, but as a new key casing was R400 each, I said no and fixed them myself with electrical tape! Brett also noticed that our gas cap kept popping open and he fixed that for free, which is really useful as now no one can skim any diesel off us!
We paid him for the work he did to the car and got in, set up the sat nav for Craddock ready to go and he comes to the car to give us an industrial spanner set! He had told us that the spanner set that comes with these landrovers is pretty bad as it tends to make people twist the knuts and not turn them, which can wear the edges and also break the spanner. It was so very very kind of him to give us that spanner set for free, and even more so because he could quite possibly save us from a very sticky situation further along our trip! Thank you Brett :D
We set off on our way to Craddock, a 2 hour journey on a fairly easy road. Mike had given us directions to Lesley and Gavin's farm from Craddock, but they turned out to need some deciphering as the first instruction to follow the Milnerton road out of town with the steers on our left really meant turn left after about 500m onto the road to Milnerton :D the rest of his instructions were great, we got a little confused about which dirt road to turn onto but we eventually got to Gavin and Lesley's farm, on the right 14kms down the road, not the left 16kms down the road ;) just after 6pm.
We spotted what I assumed to be their new house on the hill from the main dirt road and we trundled our way up there. When we got to the top the front door was open but I called out and walked through the house and no one was about! My phone was acting up when we got there so I couldn't phone Lesley, so we simply waited a few minutes and she came walking up the hill for their store. Their new house is beautiful!!! The views from every single room are magnificent, you can see their entire farm and much much more! The sunset was spectacular, and I can see why Gavin and Ross trucked in sand for Lesley to be able to have her garden up here, as no other house location could compare!
We sat and had a lovely long chat with Lesley before Gavin arrived back from the store. They both decided to go into town for dinner and take us to a pizza place they love called Mila's. Before we left we had a look at their map and decided on a route to do tomorrow as they advised not going into Lesotho. The drive into town on those dirt roads felt so much better in their newer saloon car than our little old Snolly! We enjoyed a fabulous dinner at Milas, I opted for a Pollo pizza, chicken, peppers, mushrooms and sweet chilli sauce with extra bacon. Dan had delicious vegetarian pizza called Al Greco with spinach, feta, and basil. After that delicious meal and the longish day of driving, it felt wonderful to be able to close our eyes and fall asleep with full tummys!
No comments:
Post a Comment