The Journey

The journey to (or from) Agulhas used to take 2 hours and 40 minutes. Every time. Exactly. You could set your watch by it.
Those days are gone now. Yesterday was close on 4 hours as the outrageous slings and arrows of roadworks, accidents and traffic made life about 1 hour and 20 minutes more difficult than it needed to be.

Once down past Napier though, it’s a whole new world. Open roads, open fields, and wildlife galore. Ostriches, including chicks, storks, baboons, grysbok and even a speedy caracal racing across the road in front of us. And the large evening light, bathing everything in watery primrose yellow.

I should have stopped so we could see and share these things (the caracal was long gone though, sorry), but every time, the destination takes precedent over the trip down here. It’s sad, because I think we miss a lot that way, but we either want to get here, or we don’t want to leave here, meaning that we have limited time to get back: stopping is not a favourable option.

Thus, what’s needed is a week here, and a planned slow drive down. Taking 8 hours to get here when you have fewer than 48 hours before you’re due home – ready to resume normal, stressful life – seems ridiculously wasteful. But 8 hours of different experiences to begin a week of relaxation seems to make complete sense.

So now all I need is a week off work. One that I’m not spending elsewhere, doing other exciting things, that is.

Sadly, that’s not happening anytime soon, but hey, we shouldn’t complain about such #FirstWorldProblems, right?

Analogue

The Southern Cape (and I’m talking specifically of the Overberg, Theewaterskloof and Cape Agulhas municipalities here) is so beautiful right now. Lush, green farmland full of blue cranes, fields of bright yellow canola flowers, rolling hills and the all the fun of the fair with the R316 dipping and curving through the landscape.

There are other great driving songs out there, of course. But a-ha’s Analogue was playing as we headed past the infamous Houtkloof turn just north of Napier, and it needs sharing.

For the UK viewers out there (presumably in… the UK), I think the video should come with some sort of warning about setting off fireworks in an oil refinery; namely – don’t.