We travelled up to Pretoria in time for Samantha's 21st birthday party. What a blast, the theme was the Mad Hatters Party, the venue was the function venue at Sutherland High School, so suitable in that it was big enough for everyone and cozy enough at the same time - it was winter after all. Great that everyone went to some effort to dress to the theme, some with hats and some with outfits and all sorts.
The cake was just amazing, Charmaine made it all, right down to the little flowers, caterpillar and Alice in the teacup, also the little cup cakes, she is really talented. The food was awesome, lamb, pork and beef on the spit with salads and rolls and pudding, good company and good music made it a most fun evening.
Three days later and my mom and I were winging our way to London, via Dubai (8 hour stop over at 24:00 made the trip exhausting). Caught the coach to Bristol and made it to my grans house in Fishponds by 18:30 - a looooong trip indeed. The reason we were there -
my gran was convalescing in a rehabilitation centre after hip replacement surgery following a fall on the day she was due to go to a Residential Home. We needed to assess her situation and decide where would be best for her to go to live from the Rehabilitation Centre and to empty all her personal effects from the house - it belonged to her late husband who left her life rights and his family were to take possession once she was settled somewhere, AND we had 10 days in which to accomplish all this - didn't take long to realise that wasn't going to happen.
It was my grans 94th birthday on 31 August and Leanne, who was attending a team building work conference in Scotland, sponsored by Chivas Regal (very lucky fish) was to fly to Bristol to help celebrate. My cousin, Sarah, had spent much time with my gran helping her plan the whole day,
lunch was to be at Papa's at Weston Super Mare, renowned for their fish and chips and my gran had a story that owner and staff throw mushrooms to the queue of waiting patrons to stave off hunger, fortunately we didn't need to wait. Sarah and her niece had made cakes, one big one for sharing at the Rehab Centre and two fairy cakes, with candles, for the restaurant, so thoughtful and really made my gran feel special. Shopping was to be at a clothing shop where she often buys herself something, last time she was there she had Sarah running around with a full length mirror so she could check out clothes,
then after lunch a stroll down the pier, meeting a balloon artist who made her a flower that lasted for nearly a week and then along the beach front. She had such fun and felt really spoiled, loved her presents and cards and the fuss it meant so much to her.
So much to do, trying to make sense of the "System", finding an appropriate Residential Care Home, as we decided that my gran needed to be looked after and cared for, finally, after having done so for others all her life and making sure she was settled and happy, we decided that we needed to stay on longer, 10 days was nowhere near long enough, and extended our stay by another three weeks. Then we got to work and chipped away and by jove, we did it. Not without incidents, some annoying, some fun, some funny.
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| View of cars parked on either of the road, from the bus |
As we were whizzing all over Bristol we hired a car, the first one for 10 days, then found another agent closer to home and cheaper and got a car from them for the remainder of the trip. Both times a lovely Renault Clio although for the second car I had requested something small, a Hyundai Getz or similar as driving in the UK is a nightmare - in my view anyway. The roads are narrow, were built for horse and carts after all, and cars are parked along both sides of the road - houses rarely have garages and cars duck in and out behind parked cars in tight areas to be able to pass, I recon a Smart car would have been a good choice.
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| Damage :-( |
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| Renault rental car |
Driving in a foreign country is challenging to say the least and as I had no bearings and generally suffer from a lack of sense of direction, was most grateful for the awful foreign lady in my GPS on my phone who couldn't even pronounce Tennis Court Lane, but she did manage to get us un-lost often - not without an argument I might add. It is quite a challenge to drive and use the GPS in the phone at the same time and this resulted in taking the wrong road often, forcing re-calculations of the journey. That said, I never seemed to take the same wrong turn twice thus we never took the same route twice, made for interesting trips all over Bristol, even ended up on the highway to London once by accident!! Imagine my utter astonishment and frustration when I returned the car and on the way home with one of the drivers from the Rental Agent, he announces that the Renault Clio's are popular rental cars due to their built in SatNav (GPS) and upon my query he points out the little house symbol on the radio - a built in GPS - aaaarrrgghhh!!!!!
Whilst there we managed to fit in some fun things. I spent my first weekend in Coventry with my friend Leonie, haven't seen her since she left South Africa +/- 7 years ago.
She rents an awesome home, furnished with all her lovely South African furniture, only one neighbour and she has squirrels and red breasted robins in her back yard, which is quite substantial. Coventry is very interesting, lots of Indian restaurants which didn't disappoint. We did a proper tourist walk on the Sunday,
to Coventry Cathedral which was badly bombed during the war,
around the wall that surrounded the city,
past the statue of Lady Godiva, very interesting and steeped in history. Loved my visit and was utterly spoiled. Had been told the speed limit on the highways was 50 miles per hour so was beetling down the highway toward Coventry, cars screaming past me like I was looking for a parking space, there are NO speed signs on the highway, but eventually I decided to keep up with the traffic - around 70miles per hour, on enquiring from Leonie yes, the speed limit is in fact 70miles per hour on the highway, very funny, not!!
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| Royal Crescent - Bath |
We also managed a very brief visit to Bath with Leanne, on the day she was leaving in fact. Walked all around Bath, unfortunately couldn't visit the baths and there wasn't enough time for the Hop on Hop off bus, did visit the Cathedral and strolled along the river Avon and walked right through town to go see Royal Crescent, well worth it. 
We also found ourselves fascinated by a "golden" muse and his lady, it must be physically impossible to stay in the position he attained, with someone sitting on your legs, yet someone went around the back to check and there was nothing there. Every time they got money they moved!! What a lovely town.
One afternoon my mom and I did a visit to Cheddar, somewhere my we both love. It is the most picturesque little town and really does make genuine Cheddar Cheese and clotted cream fudge and the best shortbread in the world. There is no shortage of different flavours of cheese and cider and sweets in the various tourist shops, amongst the usual tourist type gifts.
The highlight of Cheddar has to be Cheddar Gorge and Cheddar Caves, again, unfortunately we ran out of time - but like Arnold Schwartzeneger - I will be back!!!! We had a lovely ploughmans platter for lunch, cheese and cold meat and cider - yum.
My mom's cousin Diane offered to go visit my gran, giving us the day off to enjoy ourselves so we took a trip to Yate, a little town in the middle of the country - needed to do shopping for my gran. The centre took all of about an hour to explore so we treated ourselves to a nice pub lunch, then decided to catch the bus to Kingswood, not far from Fishponds where we were staying. We hopped on the appropriate bus and took off for one of the most exhilarating, terrifying, funny bus rides I have ever had. The driver was 15 minutes late and needing to catch up so we hurtled up, down and around the narrow lanes, almost colliding with another bus and narrowly avoiding a head on with an oncoming car - who was actually in the wrong lane on a bend!! We flew past a lady walking her dogs, bit of fist shaking involved there and stops were not popular. We whizzed through Kingswood and one look at the puzzled frown on my mothers face told me things were not good, eventually the bus driver slowed down enough to ask where we actually wanted to get off - we were the last passengers on the bus, and that was when we found out there are two Kingswoods (who knew, well my mother didn't anyway :-)) and this was the bus to the wrong one. The only solution was to stay on board, back to Yate to collect a new driver and then onward again as this bus was then scheduled to go to the right Kingswood!!! After a good two hours on the bus and a really interesting tour of the beautiful countryside, we arrived in Kingswood just as the shops were closing, we went home giggling.
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| View from Cabot Tower around Bristol |
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| View from Cabot Tower |
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| Sarah, Mark, mom & I on boat ferry |
We caught the bus into Bristol centre a couple of times, traveling on the top of the double decker bus, at the front, is an absolute treat. We did a walk up and down the canal to the SS Great Britian, very brief, again time limits and we indulged in the double decker tour bus to see a bit more of Bristol but by far the best trip we had was when Sarah and Mark collected us from home on the last Sunday
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| Suspension Bridge |
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| River Avon under the Suspension Bridge |
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| Navigating in Japan |
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| Shopping Centre board |
We landed in South Africa on Wednesday and Kevin arrived back, 4 days later from four difficult but interesting weeks in Japan, Atsugi, Kanagawa to be exact. Tokyo and even Yokohama, the closest main centres, are more geared for tourists and thus use of english is about 90% more than Atsugi.
It never occurred to me how difficult things like navigation and even drawing money from an ATM would be if there is no english.
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| Navigating in Japan |
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| Pizza Menu |
It took him a while but Kevin eventually managed to figure out how to navigate the transport system and to draw money, order food, etc. Sushi is beeeg in Japan :-)
On the day Kevin arrived we celebrated with a trip to the locally made beer tasting show with the Westons and Hooles, what fun, some really nice and some really unusual beers, it seems that when it comes to brewing your own beer, a bit of imagination and the sky is the limit. Monday saw us at the Japanese embassy getting Kevin another visa as he is flying back to Japan on 28 October again. This time I will go with, time to go do some exploring :-) We arrived back to the tail end of a huge 50 knot south westerly that caused minor damage to the moorings and all the boats were well taken care of - the marina staff are vigilant and pro-active, so impressed. Chrissy and Alan were back and had also kept an eye on Maxscene for us, our worst loss being the Weber braai cover.
A week and a half later and we flew to Cape Town for two nights to attend the Cape Town boat show with Graeme and Michelle. Really enjoyable, a little disappointing as it definitely didn't offer as much by way of stands or boats as the one we attended 4 years ago, guess it is a sign of the times, but we made some great contacts, people to get hold of when we get to Cape Town next year and we narrowly managed to escape without having bought a SUP (Stand Up Paddle) Board and Paddle - this time, but next year for sure.
We did buy wine, only to realise we had cabin cases and you cannot put liquids over 100ml in them so packed it really well and put one of our bags into the hold. Ironically, as we were catching a really early plane back we had breakfast packed for us by the hotel. It came in polystyrene containers and we did not open them until we were through the security check and blow me down if there wasn't a 500ml bottle of cooldrink in each container that had passed through the x-ray machines without incident, recon we could have left the wine in our cabin luggage and it would have been fine.
Took MaxScene out for a sail in perfect conditions, were visited by the huge school of dolphins again and this time were brave enough to fly and lower our new spinnaker sail by ourselves, successfully, very impressed with ourselves :-).
We were so hoping to have sailed our boat to Port Elizabeth before flying to Japan, leaving her there for the three weeks and continuing our trip from there but unfortunately the weather windows have not been adequate, we need a good couple of days of North/North Easterly winds between Durban and Port Elizabeth, but it seems to be improving so by the time we are back from Japan we should be able to sail away asap.
We will miss Durban, it has been really awesome staying here, the Marina staff are fabulous and professional, each of the clubs have something great to offer and Durban is a beautiful city which we have explored and enjoyed.Finally, just before we left Rob brought back our stunningly refurbished Tender motor. Took it out for a spin on Saturday, running really well.
Been really busy with the sewing
machine the last week, for me
thats quite something, made a
new life raft cover, Weber Braai
cover, 3 winch covers and 2 new
shower curtains for the bathrooms.
Next blog after Japan visit, should be fun.....
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