Cape Town! It was a tough fight; but we won!

Friday, September 23, 2022

Up early and out the door by 6:45.  Across the parking lot and in the departures terminal by 7:00. There are already people in line at the AirLink counters, which means that our flight will probably take off!  Even though we couldn't check in, there is no problem.  We drop our luggage, get our boarding passes and pass through security.  These were the nicest TSA people ever! On to our gate. It wasn't too hard to find ass the airport only has five of them!!

We board easily and our seats.  It's a short flight and we expected, maybe, a drink and a snack.  Instead we got another of those beautiful snack boxes filled with a cheese croissant, a strawberry "dairy food", a lemon-poppy seed muffin and a piece of fudge!!

Oooooo!  Mountains!

We land on time, which for once doesn't really matter to us, and our bags show up pretty quickly.  Now we're off to the rental car place, kind of a hike and one of eight or ten different companies who operate here in Cape Town. We're pretty concerned that they might have given away our car since we didn't claim it yesterday, or that we can't have it until six o'clock this evening since that's when we thought we'd arrive if we drove from PE.  Happily, neither of those happened and we have a shiny red Suzuki Brezza and a Garmin to help us get around.

Marilyn keeps muttering "Stay left!  Stay left!" and we get really close to the hotel. I'm not partial tto this kind of GPS, but between it and some educated guessing we finally arrive.  It would have helped if we had been told that Place on the Bay and Fairways on the Bay were actually the same place! But never mind!  We're here and we have a parking place off the road and a large room, called Lion's Head, with a balcony and a view of Lion's Head Mountain!

We get settled in and are off to The Mynt next door to use our breakfast voucher. Basically it means that we can subtract the value of the voucher from our bill. We choose the seafood platter for two, which should have been called the seafood platter for four!!  It's all yummy but, oh my, that's a lot of food!  We had planned to have a salad for dinner but we probably won't even do that!

The currency is the Rand and it's worth $0.06

We take our leftovers with us and walk the magnificent beach for just a bitt before a "starving artist" stops us.  First he points out the names of the mountains around us, Lion's Head, Table Mountain, and The Twelve Apostles. Then he begins hiss sales pitch.  And it works.  We each buy one of his canvases. I guess I'll be redesigning my wall space at home!

I'm taking pictures (imagine that) while Marilyn gets caught by a man who can't feed his children. We give him our leftovers and he scarfs down some of the fish right then.  Who knows what he'll do with the rest - or if he even has children.

We don't want any more encounters so we head back and run into the charming lady who checked us in.  Marilyn asks her about the guys on the beach and she says not to give them food or money. Some are really in trouble, but most are scammers.  But it is true that everyone has been hit really hard by COVID and the economy here, like everywhere else, is struggling to recover.

We go upstairs to rest a bit and think about the rest of our time here.  First things first.  There is a terrible water shortage here in SSouth Africa.  We saw signs in our hotel is PE and here in Cape Town as well, that ask you to limit your shower to two minutes, baths are not allowed, and linens will not be changed until you check out.  Towels may be changed every three days.  And there are no water bottles in the rooms. That being said, we need to buy water, so we drive to the Pack n Pay down the street and stock up on essentials like chips and cheese and crackers and some delicious amoretto flavored cookies from Italy!  And water, of course. There is a man in the parking lot who is directing people to the limited parking places and we aren't sure if he works for the little arcade or is free-lancing! Everyone seems to have a side hustle.

We also stopped into Woolworths, which isn' a five and dime here;
it's quite upscale!!

Lots of gluten-free foods

These are all kinds of feat!

from our balcony

It's nearly sunset, so I grab my phone and head back to the beach.  There are some large rocks along one part of the shore that are climbable, so climb I must! When I get back we have cheese and crackers for dinner and plan out our route for tomorrow's wine tasting tour in Stellenbosch. And Sisa checks in on uss on WhatsApp!  What a sweetheart!

Lion's Head!

It's been a long day and it's time for bed! But breakfast isn't served until 9:00, so we don't have to set an alarm! Yay!