Day 15

Day 15 – On the road again


A not so bright start as we all appear to have hangovers, but we are still up around 8 and we contribute a tin of beans to the breakfast menu! Lyn is very attentive again, the dining room is a great setting and our hangovers start to dissipate. An hour later we are packed and set off towards Bloemfontein, it’s now that we start to make things up with regard to hotels and destinations as we are dependent on the England team and how well they do on the pitch. The next game is in Bloemfontein on Sunday but we decide to settle on a hotel about 2 hours drive away at a place called Gariep Dam. Skip drives and I take a back seat for a change. We drive through some of the most interesting countryside you could imagine, the views we are enjoying are so big that we have to stop occasionally and take photos. The roads in this part of the world seem to be covered in monkeys, hundreds of them, all attracted to the road because of the warmth from the tarmac, we even had a very large baboon scrambling to get out of our way. The other good thing about these roads is that they are straight long and empty. We stop off at a place called Craddock to fill up, grab a coffee, access the internet, check on flights home etc. it’s quite nice in a very strange way, the local church is modelled on the one in London at St Martin-in-the –fields.

We carry on, the spare wheel carriage drops off the back and we have to stop and tie it back on, but we eventually pass through Colesberg and turn off the main N2 and head for Gariep. We find the hotel and are amazed at the views from the bedrooms across the dam waters; yet again stumbling across something that really pleases us. We seem to be doing everything right on this trip. We settle into the hotel bar, laugh at Italy losing out to Slovakia, have a few more beers and I update the blog again. I hope you enjoy this; it really is turning into an amazing trip.