Venturing Out

This tells me that we are approximately 16700 km (10350 miles) from home.

Saturday was our first day on our own, and we hardly knew what to do without a full itinerary! We got up and had a lovely last breakfast at the High Gables with a nice (talkative!) German family that was also staying there. Then we got packed up and met the van at the bottom of the hill for a ride to the airport. There, we said our good-bye's and gave our hugs and ventured out for the first time by ourselves! As our comrades headed to the departure gate, we went inside the arrivals lounge to rent a South African cell phone and to pick up our rental car (with GPS, thankfully!).

Our biggest adventure thus far has been learning to drive on the left side of the road and the right side of the car! Once we get going, it's not a problem to keep going in a straight line, but we have to think really hard and be very careful when making turns. :) And the traffic customs and road markings here are quite different - there are several signs that mean absolutely nothing to us. I guess we should have gotten a list before we arrived! Oh, well...

Not sure what to do with ourselves after we got our car, we headed back down to the waterfront to have lunch and look at our guide book to make plans. We had a wonderful seafood lunch at Willoughby and Co. and happened to sit down next to a delightful South African couple who gave us all kinds of advice on how to spend our last few days. What good luck! After lunch we walked around the waterfront a bit more and visited the Two Oceans Aquarium, where we were just in time for the 'large predator' feeding - so fascinating.

That's me with Desmond Tutu (or a statue of him) at Nobel Square.

Nemo at the aquarium!

Then we wound our way around town (getting slightly lost, since our GPS had no idea where our hotel was) and made our way to the Four Rosmead, where Elizabeth's brother Brian had so graciously made us a reservation. It is an exquisite littel guesthouse with only 8 rooms and superb service - much nicer than we would have chosen for ourselves, but a wonderful treat! We've decided that the three nights here count for the anniversary celebration that we skipped last month. :)

We had a fantastic dinner at a little Italian place nearby, took advantage of the hotel's wi-fi connection to catch up a bit on blogging, and hit the sack, looking forward to three more days of Cape Town!