Cape Town: We’re going places

Prepare yourselves. This is going to be a super long blog.

On Thursday, 15 April, my teammates and I left PMB and headed off into the great unknown. Well, that is to say, we were making our way to Cape Town some 16 hours away. The trip got off to a weird start. We were supposed to leave first thing in the morning on Thursday in order to make it to Bloemfontain (our pit stop for the night) to hang out with the NZMI pastor's family there. However, due to some unfortunate events (the car was in the shop forever), we didn't end up leaving until roughly 2:30 with a six hour drive ahead of us and only a few hours of sunlight remaining. Praying that our bumper would stay on, I was just glad to get away from the fleas and bugs that have been rapidly raiding the manse as we finally (finally!) headed out on our Cape Town journey.

After a restless night, we said goodbye Pastor Irvin and his family and headed out (a little bit disappointed that we couldn't stay in Bloem longer since the place looks beautiful, places are actually open past 6 and we can't really remember very much of it since we were so jetlag the last time we were there for convention in September). 10 hours is a long time for the five of us to be jammed into the ballade, even if it is a champion of a car. We drove through some pretty arid areas (which reminded me of the part of Colorado, right before you get to the Rocky Mountains) before we reached the looming mountains and lush vineyards of the Western Cape. It was long but it was beautiful.

We arrived just in time to go to the NZMI church's youth that Friday evening, which is way tinier than our church's youth (since New Zion is only 12 years old) but it was so nice. It felt more "youth group-ish." like what I went to back in the day.

The next day, we had no idea what they had in store for us. During the planning stages of this trip, we had asked the NZMI church if we could come and be with them for a weekend (in order to turn this "holiday" into a work-cation in order to "justify" it. So we had no idea if they were going to put us to work or what. Originally the plan had been that on Saturday we were going to help someone with some type of "sports outreach" (internal groan - I am terrible at all things sports) but that is all we knew. I don't know if Pastor Hilton had anything to do with this or not (since he did tell us that we should just relax in Cape Town) but we woke up on Saturday morning (late) and discovered that nope, we weren't going to be working at all.  The morning was interesting since Ps. Hilton and Mama Rhoda took us to the arcade in the mall. Afterwards, the Youth pastor and a bunch of people from the church were going to take us around the city instead. (Apparently Cape Town is insanely chill. It's awesome. Unlike PMB where it's culturally appropriate to get up at like 5 or 6 since sleeping in can be seen as being "lazy," Cape Townians apparently like to stay up late and sleep in longer. Finally). It was so nice. They took us to Hout bay first where they bought us ice cream (which is always a win with me for sure), took us along the Atlantic cost, and eventually ended up at the V and A waterfront, which is this insanely large mall(s) area where we had fish and chips (at, unfortunately, a chain restaurant). The whole was great. It was really nice of them.

On Sunday, we got to experience life again when church was over before lunch. Stellar.

The next two days were filled with our own adventures (even though we ended up staying with the Tooheys the whole time). On Monday we drove down the Indian Ocean side down to Simon's bay to see penguins!!! It was awesome, even if we had to pay to see them. Boo. Then we had lunch at a cute café and drove down to Cape Point National Park where we proceeded to hike up to a lighthouse at Cape Point before we headed down another trail to the Cape of Good Hope. Wow. I can't even begin to describe how unreal the beauty of Cape Point is. All I know that as I looked down on both the Indian and Atlantic ocean, I knew that God was near. Unbelievable. After the park we drove up the Atlantic side and were able to park and watch the sunset before we found a nice pizzeria for supper. :-)

Tuesday brought about a very similar day – but way more chill. Instead of climbing a mountain, we decided to head back down to the False Bay area and just find a coffee shop and chill, which we did. That is what I love – conversations over coffee and great slices of quiche.

We rolled out of Cape Town on Wednesday morning. We stopped at backpackers in Jeffrey's Bay (which is a surfing town right on the coast). I wish we could've stayed there longer. The ocean was a block away from our flat. Awesome.

We spent the rest of our time in Mthatha, where we were going to hang out with Sawatzky's again but found out at the last minute that they forget that they were going to be away. But they still invited us to come and chill. So we did. We barely did anything for three days. It was awesome. It was also cold so most of the time was spent drinking large quantities of tea, reading, or being bundled up on the couch watching Dvds. Amazing.

And now we're back. And it's hard to get over that. Cape Town was probably the most beautiful place I've ever been too. Plus, Mthatha was great too. We definitely needed that type of getaway.

I am glad to be out of the car though. Wow. It was a lot of driving. But it was still all worth it (especially as our ballade wove in and out of a pack of baboons in the middle of the road).

Now, I just have to gear up for the last stretch of life in Pietermaritzburg. Aybo.

(Side note: One of my favorite things to do during our many road adventures was to watch out for the "animal crossing" signs. They were great. We saw the typical deer ones – although here that means impala or something along that family line, but we did see tons of pothole warnings, high accident zones (including a sign that said Days accident free:0, Record without accident: 11), but my favorites included a sign with a cow on it, (but underneath it, it had a random phone number. So it looked as if you could call the cow. Awesome.), penguins, baboons and my absolute fav: an airplane. That was somewhere near Mthatha. Was the road a landing strip also? Nobody knows. Regardless, it was still hilarious.)