Our hotel is on Church Street in Stellenbosch. If we step out from the door of the hotel and look down the street, we can see it clearly about two blocks away. On one of our walks yesterday we got to get up close. It’s a beautiful old building.
We managed to wake up in our new time zone this morning in reasonably good shape. Our Hotel is lovely, and we had a wonderful breakfast at the hotel restaurant, which earns high marks from all of us. I managed quite well with a salmon eggs Benedict and a pretty good cappuccino.
We took a walk around the neighborhood that surrounds our hotel, and it is a beautiful, active downtown area with lots of unique shops, restaurants, galleries and historical buildings. We will be returning to spend some more time in a couple of the shops, especially one notable leather shop, and a couple of outstanding jewelry stores.
We had a reservation at the Waterford Wine Estate, where we had great lunch (with wine). We then went on a tour of the estate with a very cool and bright young economics graduate student as our guide, the four of us, and a mother and daughter (both in the 50+ demographic) from the Netherlands. The estate is in a beautiful mountainous area, and is quite large. Our guide, Jason, made it an absolutely enjoyable tour… which we finished with more wine.
All in all, and outstanding way to start the trip.
We’ve gone from Eugene to Denver, Denver to Newark. In a couple of hours it will be 14+ hours of Newark to Cape Town. Wish us luck!
Hi. I may have told you about this page that we’re going to be using to post some interesting (we hope) things from our upcoming trip. It may not look like a trip diary yet, but that’s because we haven’t actually left home yet, and won’t do so for a while.
You may want to bookmark this page to make it easy to get to again. It probably won’t show up in a Google search, because I’ve set it up NOT to index. We’re also NOT doing a FaceB thing, because it’s a lot easier for the whole world to get to that, and we really don’t want the whole world to know we’re traveling.
No promises about how often we’ll post, but we’ll do our best. Wish us luck!
Gracie is helping get ready for our trip. She won’t be going, but she still plays a very important part.
As I write this, we have barely a week before we take off. We’re working on packing, getting all of our documents ready, gathering needed items, rethinking clothing, and trying to decide about things like this site. How do we communicate with you? Well, this is our best shot for now. Bookmark this page, and we’ll try to keep the content coming. Cheers!
