We woke up early, at 6am this morning to pack and get ready to leave, even though we knew we would probably not be ready to leave straight away. We had a really great breakfast of toast, fried eggs, sausages and tomatoes. The sausages that Kerry gets from a farmer friend of hers are really yummy, they actually taste like pork :D We ended up chatting with all the Nish's for quite a while, and they gave us very very valuable advice that on our drive we would pass through the diamond fields and to not stop at all on that stretch. People would stand at the side of the road and make a shape of a diamond with their thumbs and forefingers, and if you stopped more often than not it could actually be a police ambush, at which point, even if you were stopped for a sandwich, they would accuse you of dealing in diamonds and put you straight into jail! Ok, so no stopping then!
We left their house at around 8:00am and on our way out of town we stopped to fuel up. I had read on the Troutbeck information sheet we had to check in that we were advised to bring food along with us as the Spar opposite the resort didn't have much. We set the sat nav to take us straight there and we were to pass through Mutare, where we decided to stop for food for the three nights we were at Troutbeck. On the road to Mutare wedding see a man gesturing for us to buy diamonds, who we speedily drove by! Don't get me wrong, I love diamonds but not uncut, illegal ones!! We stopped at the Spar in Mutare and stocked up on food, atrociously expensive food. They wanted $9 for a tub of feta that would have cost us $4 in South Africa. They didn't sell firewood either. We only bough the bare necessities before leaving the town.
We carried on driving the last 140kms to Troutbeck, and thankfully didn't encounter nearly as many police stops along the way, obviously there are not enough opportunities on the quieter roads to rip people off. we arrived and checked in at around 3 in the afternoon, and we're given the keys to our house, number 14. The resort and area is much the same as I remember it, a lot less green because we usually went after the rainy season, but it looked just the same. There was also the heady smell of pine trees in the air that I remember so very well from when I was little. Our cabin is lovely, probably in need of an update in the next couple of years, but still very homely and with an absolutely stunning view of the lakes.
When we had unpacked the car, the first thing Dan did was turn the TV onto the news to find out what was happening with the presidential elections. I made us each a bacon roll and we got the update on how all the voting was going in the different states. The voting booths would only start to close between 2am and 5am our time, so we planned to stay up and watch the voted roll in. We spent much of the afternoon outside enjoying the view and inside flicking between normal TV and the news. I brought down a mattress from the loft and laid it in front of the tv to have a nap while Dan continued watching repetitive speculative coverage.
Once it was about 9 in the evening Jenny decided she was going to properly retire for the night and asked me to wake her up every once and a while with updates on the election. I had assumed that we were only 7 hours ahead of the east coast of the states but we we really 8 hours ahead. This meant that the results would be coming in later than I thought and it made sense to grab some sleep before the first polling stations closed at 2 in the morning. So I set an alarm for 1:00 and drifted off to sleep.
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