Monday Oct 8th – Wednesday Oct 10th

The start of three days of cold wet weather – thank goodness it wasn’t like this when Chris & Linda were here. Alison woke up with a nasty cold which was to get worse. I enrolled for a month at the Virgin Active gym. Although we will only be here for two weeks, at R470 a month it is cheaper than R95 a day if I go more than 5 times – motivation! I needed to post at the internet café but Alison was not feeling well and spent the afternoon in bed. I bought her Med-Lemon, SA “mootie” for colds & flu. In the main house where we are staying, there is an extremely large entertainment room on the ground floor, which, besides a very large bar, and casual dining facilities, includes a full size English snooker table. Our host, Christian Meyer has a snooker evening every Monday and Vic Wolff is one of the players. Although we were going out for dinner at 6.30, I met the snooker guys for “one drink” at 6.00 – which turned into one game of snooker. Due to some very bad play and only Vic actually sinking any balls, the game lasted longer than anticipated so when I returned to the apartment above the garage to pick up Alison, I was late and in trouble! We had dinner at the home of Peter & Jenny Aston and they another guest, Colin Trader. Colin is 85 years old but looks much younger. When I told him that, long ago, I had crossed the finishing line of the Karoo 50 miler marathon with a Roger Trader, he confirmed that that was his son! We had a lovely evening with them. I will find the photograph of us crossing the line together, hands held high in the air in elation at finishing, and send it to him.

Christian Meyer is a walker and on the Monday evening we agreed that I would join him at 8.30 on Tuesday morning which I did. We walked 10K along the beach and back (5K each way – 6 ¼ miles – Alison stayed in bed to help her cold. We went to a Rotarian lunch at the PE Club as the guests of Arthur Ahlschlager where we met a number of old Round Tablers and other friends – Ross Kobus, Cameron Scott, Tony Oshry, Vaughn Giles, Philip Shaw, Peter Long. We stopped at the internet café on the way back to pick up email. Vic was coming to the apartment at 5pm to sort out some accounting for the first two weeks of our trip but we had an area wide power outage at about 4pm (after all, this is Africa). Fortunately, it didn’t last too long after 5pm and Vic and I were able to allocate various receipts to participating parties so that we can send them a “statement of account”. We picked up Carol at about 7.35 and when to an Italian restaurant in the Casino/Bordwalk complex and had pizza and red wine – a great combination.

Wednesday I walked again with Christain and then Alison and I went off to lunch at the PE Golf Club where we met Tony & Christine Oshry. Tony was at Shatterprufe when I joined them in October 1968. Also Ross Kobus, who is a well known PE vet, and Pat & Cameron Scott. Pat is the sister of Frank Thompson who I sailed with at the Swartkops Yacht Club in the late 60s, early 70s. A nice lunch and great to see old friends again, but just not enough time to catch up with everyone. Back to the apartment via the internet café and as we drove along the beachfront we noticed (not difficult) that the traffic lights were not working and surmised that we had another power outage. This was confirmed when our remote wouldn’t open the gate at the Meyer’s home. Because it was still light, Marlies (who was playing bridge with her ladies) had no idea there was a power outage and it was only when I called her on her cell phone and said we were stuck outside in the street that she found out. The gates were changed to manual mode and we drove in. I was feeling the effects of my morning walk and “had a rest” while Alison worked on some photographs for the blog. This evening we went to our log-time friend Netty Green’s for dinner with invited guests Cris Tinley and Rob & Jenny McWilliams, all of whom we have known for almost 40 years. Chris was Managing Director of Shatterprufe where I worked for 17 years and he was instrumental in moving me in 1985 to Solaglas in Los Angeles, USA. He swears that it wasn’t to get me out of his hair! Considering how much it must have cost to move the whole family and containers, I think he is telling the truth. It was a great (and late) evening.

PS. We have just had a cell phone call from Marlies - the power is out again (third day in a row) so the gates are not working (This is definitely Africa!).