This trip has been a year in planning and we have counted down to departing today. You can take nothing for granted these days with Covid and we were never sure whether it would happen or not and if it did happen what restrictions would confront us. The good news is that we left this afternoon for 2.5 weeks of holiday and celebrating my 50th birthday.
We had originally planned to fly up to game park area (where we are headed) but after B bought a new car and I so enjoyed driving my car up to the ECape recently, we decided to drive. We left this afternoon at 2pm for our first stop on route. We decided to just take a few hours off our drive tomorrow by stopping at Matjiesfontein on the way north. It is just under a 3-hour drive and we arrived at just after 5pm. There was a significant amount of traffic on the road heading out from Cape Town but after about an hour it (fortunately) reduced significantly.
On arrival at Matjiesfontein we went to check in (the town is basically just a hotel for those of you who don’t know) to discover that they only had 1 room for us when they were meant to have had 3 rooms. I had booked on their own website! Fortunately I had a printed copy of the confirmed reservation to show them. Not that it seemed to matter because they told us that they were fully booked! I said that really wasn’t my issue and that they better sort it out. A manager came and said they would check whether some people were still arriving or not. They called them and I could overhear the conversation and it turned out they had a ‘tentative’ reservation. I could not believe that they would even call someone with a tentative reservation when they had a confirmed reservation (and some irate) customer right in front of them. Fortunately they weren’t coming and so we were able to get 3 rooms for us (it is H & I, C (daughter), B (friend) and J (boyfriend of C … first time to SA and first time on trip with us).
We had a quick walk up and down the main road before having some pre-dinner drinks and then we headed in for dinner (6 of us had lamb chops – we are in the Karoo and so Karoo lamb chops was the predominant choice – and one outlier had the fillet). An enjoyable dinner and as always (and more importantly), enjoyable company.
Until tomorrow ….
P, H, C, J, B, B & S