Ramblings of a Proper Pensioner

A soft landing saw us on African soil ( concrete really )  ahead of schedule .

Walking down the glass corridor to passport control I caught sight of our tour reps down below in arrivals and gesticulated, in an extravagant fashion - all wavy arms and  blown kisses . Mrs Coy thought --- lost it , really lost it. But then she, having advanced a few paces also saw Al and Linda through the glass partition.

Good sight  ( not you Al, of course ).

Excellent chauffeur job to our home for the next 7 weeks. Thanks Al.

The house is truly splendid. Not grandiose, but very liveable. Great views, manicured garden, swimming pool, comfy beds. Who needs more ?

Our first day was spent on an SA  wine tour, of our own design,just driving around through Stellenbosch and Franschoek getting used to the car and the local driving conventions. All pretty good. Big tick !

Day 2. I become 65 ----- a proper pensioner. And what do PPs do by choice ? Go to hit golf balls at the local range ........

"Sorry guys, closed for routine maintenance". 

Mowing the grass etc. 

J S Coy subject to mild abuse...... ” didn't you check the times ?" D'oh.

Back to the biggest mall in Africa for a touch of Harry Worth ( juveniles look it up )

Bought a patio table and chairs and a cool box ( are you sure there's not one at the house ?. Yes, absolutely ? )

Got back home  to find one in the cupboard. 

Big chill. 

Take it back tosspot !

No problemo. 

With an Aldi in Newton Stewart, I am so used to buying tempting tools and other paraphernalia that returning stuff is second nature.

"Back again Mr Coy ?"

"Or should that be Mr Refund ?"

"Yes, very funny Gillian"

More about lunch to follow.

Exciting. Or what ?

Coy the Elder

Vergelegen vineyard for lunch

Happy Birthday To Stu

A couple of days since I last wrote an update albeit I did post one earlier today which had been written shortly after our arrival in South Africa but held back publishing until we had resolved an issue with the alarm system. See the blog about the match stalks.

Today deserves a dispatch because it is big brother Stuart's 65th birthday and he therefore officially becomes an even bigger burden on the State! Actually, between the four of us here three are now a burden on the system but for me, it will be a number of years yet before I receive the benefit of my 38 years in full time work.  It is also extremely useful that one of us still has all of their faculties available and is therefore in a position to see that his charges all take their tablets at the correct time and are also back to our home here in Cape Town and tucked up and in bed before 10pm! Fortunately none of them are yet in a position of needing a story read to them!

Oh but what a lovely day we have had today courtesy of big bro's first pension payment.  You see to celebrate the occasion he booked for the four of us to have a picnic under the magnificent camphor trees in Vergelegen. This is a stunning vineyard in a dream location and the picnic provided under the trees was outstandingly delicious from first bite to last.  Even better when complimented by a bottle of the vineyard's finest bubbly together with a crisp but very light Sauvignon Blanc.

Linda and I had enjoyed this experience previously at Vergelegen but the enjoyment today went completely off the scale because of sharing the occasion with Stuart and Terri.  Or was it just the fact that he paid??? No it wasn't. The three hours we spent over lunch was a pure joy and I hope the photos attached today perhaps reflect a little of this wonderful experience.

And so South Africa continues to delight with breathtaking scenery, delicious food and great company and to think that we are still less than a week into this trip.

Before I sign off today, I do need to counterbalance some of my previous blogs and particular the deference shown to big bro over the style and particularly the quality of his written word compared to mine. You see I have now observed his approach alongside my own and to say we are a myriad of light years apart is an understatement.

Basically as reported before, I am from the Ernie Wise school of writing but Stuart, his heroes are the likes of Neville Cardus (Google him) and Michael Parkinson who wrote a superb column in the Sunday Times for years.

The secret of these two gentlemen is that they would write, re-write and then re-write again and again until they felt the article merited their signatures and so it is with my big brother.  Instead of writing as the words spill out of his brain and then his mouth a la Alistair, he actually crafts the blog over a period of five to seven days only being satisfied with perfection before he publishes! No wonder I felt mine were/are so inferior!!

And so adopting his style from here on in, the next update you should expect is a week on Friday!

The truth is out and I now feel a lot less thick than I did two days ago...

Big Bro Arrives

So, when did this adventure start ? 

For me, probably about 12 years ago. Back then we had quite a few offers for house exchanges to South Africa. Big houses. Houses with big swimming pools. Houses with staff. Houses in gated communities. 

And there lies the rub. Terri not happy with gated. Worried about perceived violence. Uncomfortable with deep inequality. So, no go to South Africa.

Then little brother 'phones up back in May last year ............

" How do you fancy a few weeks in Cape Town next year ?"

"What do you think TC ?"

Didn't even think. 

"Go for it !"

This response, knowing that we have a built-in tour rep / bodyguard with years of experience and , to boot,  in Linda, a professional photographer to capture those special moments. Better still, we love them. 

( Matthew, don't you dare comment )

We are currently in transit on a Qatar Airways 'Dreamliner' , aka a Boeing 787.

Reading some of the reviews on t'internet, you would have thought it should have been christened a ' Screamliner ' , mainly because of legroom.

One bloke, all of 5' 9" , said he'd never suffered such cramped torture on a long flight.

I can only think he had 4' legs and a 1' 9" body. Or an IQ of 12. Or worked for Emirates. You pick.

The plane is excellent and the crew well oiled - in the machine sense !

Me, I love airports and planes. And plane food and free plane drink. And in-flight entertainment. And the journey. 

Travel heh ? 

For us, a new country. An ancient country with a young nation. What could be better ? 

Throw in a few lions, a couple of rhinos , the occasional leopard, an odd giraffe..... Maybe a beer.

Paradise found.

This particular part of the blog contains no photographs ( due, in major part , to me being clueless ). 

It also contains no nuts, or flash photography.

I'LL BE BACK.

Big Brother.

Addendum - big bro might be older and cleverer than me but not so clever that he knows how to load photos! So with a little help from me, a photo of their arriving Qatar Dreamliner. Notice the background grey sky.  Three hours later and it's clear blue. 33 degrees forecast tomorrow. It's hell out here...

One Of Life's Finer Pleasures

This title has possibly got you all thinking, what on earth is he going to write about today??  Well actually, it's coffee and fresh baked scones so I'm sorry to disappoint if you were expecting something else!

We first visited Cape Town and specifically Somerset West a number of years ago now and many of you might not know that it lies very much on the edge of the wine lands.  If you look on a map and find Stellenbosch, then this can almost be considered the centre of wine making and lies only 20 minutes away from our current residence.

Much closer than this is a vineyard called Vergelegen which is a heavenly place to visit and almost always would be our first port of call in the area. It's a true working vineyard, we have done their fascinating wine tour, but it also possesses a restaurant and cafe in the most beautiful of locations looking out onto the Hottentots Holland mountain range.

It also serves the most divine fresh baked scones with cream and strawberry jam and very hot freshly brewed coffee.  It never fails to delight and testimony to the popularity of the place is that the restaurant is always busy whenever we visit.  It serves amazing breakfasts and wonderful lunches, all for very little money.

Yesterday, we had three coffees with the accompanying scones and the bill came to a grand total of £6.50!  At our local garden centre which does have a very good cafe, a piece of cake almost costs you that on its own!  So not only great quality in a beautiful location but also amazing value.

One other thing to make you smile, there is an entrance fee to the vineyard.  For a couple of pensioners like Linda and me this costs the grand total of just 60p.  What makes us smile even more (it must be the Yorkshire blood) is that on Mondays, entry is free for oldies so our morning treat costs less than £6.  And you get the sunshine for nothing.

Short and sweet today but I couldn't resist including some photos to make your mouth water.

Has Anybody Got Any Match Stalks??

Note - this post was the first written on our arrival but only published now (28th Jan) because the alarm has been fixed. Read on.....

Sometimes smugness does come back to haunt you and day one of our jaunt to the Winter sun of South Africa didn't quite go the way that we expected!

As you will have read from my first post, we are renting a beautiful three bedroomed detached house complete with pool in the Heldervue area of Somerset West.  For the geography afficionados amongst you, this lies about 30 minutes from Cape Town and is considered to be one of the safest and secure areas within the whole of South Africa.

That said, any house owner has to fulfil all the criteria laid down by their insurers and that means that the majority of houses benefit from some pretty comprehensive security systems and 62 Acacia Street is no different.

Colin the owner had sent us a magnificent bible of information before our departure which included a very detailed page on the alarm system.  Disarming the system on arrival appeared to require only the press of a button and a flashing LED response!  We sat for ten minutes at the front of the house trying to get this to happen, without success and in the end decided to phone Paul the agent out here. When he answered and I detailed our predicament he said, "it won't work because I'm in the house!"

And so we walked around to the back of the house to find Paul in the kitchen and Travis, his 16 year old giant of a son sitting by the pool.  We received a lovely warm welcome and a personal tour of the house which was excellent.  There was a small caveat however when Paul did say that there was a minor problem with the alarm system and that he had called ADT out to rectify it.

So all was well until around 10pm when I went into the bedroom to put the aircon on to suddenly find the alarm panel starting to beep!  No problem as entering a 4 digit code cleared the problem or so we thought.....!

Well the top and bottom of it was that every ten to twenty minutes during the night, the panel repeated the beeping process and eventually, Linda and I had to agree a roster of who was to get out of bed to deactivate it!  It was a very long night, that's all I can say.

By the time we staggered out of bed at around 10 this morning we both looked like we had been dragged through a hedge backwards and had very dark rings under our eyes. It had absolutely no effect on our safety or security, merely our sleep pattern.

Anyway after various conversations with owner Colin back in the UK and Paul the agent in Cape Town a temporary fix was found and an appointment made with the man from ADT to rectify what is a minor problem in the next couple of days.

By this afternoon and having caught up on much of our sleep on a sunbed under the shade of a lovely tree, we both felt much less jaded and able to take in the beauty of our home for five weeks and its surroundings. Stunning is the only appropriate description.

As I write tonight's blog, I am accompanied by a most delicious glass of South African Sauvignon Blanc which cost a grand total of £2.35. Life isn't too bad you know.

You Wouldn't Travel Any Other Way

Because this blog is going to be a shared effort between myself and my big brother, I have assumed that it will be read by a much larger audience because of the myriad of friends that Stuart and Terri have compared to the very few but very special band of friends that Linda and I have the privilege of knowing.

I preface this blog with the above information because many of you will not know that Stuart's niece Sarah is a British Airways pilot and that as a consequence his younger brother and wife sometimes get to turn left on the aircraft rather than right.  This is a particularly wonderful privilege when you are undertaking an 11 hour flight to South Africa as we did overnight on Wednesday of this week.

We don't really get to know if we have a comfy seat until we are just about to board the aircraft or in most cases, have boarded but if and when it does happen, our smiles go from ear to ear and become even wider when we get served a glass of wonderful chilled champagne before we even leave the stand.

The whole experience is amazing and if we could afford it, we would travel no other way.  The service we have received from BA cabin crew over the 10 years plus we have now used staff travel has never been anything other than outstanding and it makes a long journey pass in the blink of an eye particularly when you can turn your seat into a flat bed and get some genuine quality sleep.

It has also presented us with the opportunity to sit alongside some of the UK's and in some cases the world's most famous people and engage in conversation.  It makes you realise that they might be a touch wealthier than you but in essence most of them are extremely friendly and very down to earth.

Discretion means that I can't mention any in this blog but I do smile at the thought of them going home and telling their friends that they had sat next to Alistair and Linda Coy on their flight home from Los Angeles.......!  On the other hand, perhaps not?

And so we came down to South Africa in BA Club Class and I would like to finish this dispatch by including some photos to highlight the experience.  I particularly like the photo of the breakfast which I awoke to having had 5 very nice hours of sleep.

As I have said before, we never forget just what a privilege it is to travel in this way.

Another Adventure Beckons

Oh no I hear you all cry! Not another blog to wade through from this somewhat illiterate Yorkshireman?  Well yes I'm afraid it is, only this time it will be tempered by the literary skills of my much, much older brother Stuart who will be updating the blog on alternate days/weeks to myself.

For any of you that don't know Stuart (or big bro as I call him), last year he wrote a wonderful blog about his and Terri's trip around New Zealand and it was him that inspired me to take to the blogging medium when we went to Croatia in September. Yes you remembered! We didn't actually get to Croatia but  instead ended up spending a delightful three weeks in France.

That trip gave me the bug and so here I am getting in first with regard to our trip to South Africa which for Linda and I will last five weeks but for Stuart and Terri a mere seven!

I get to write the first post because we are departing today whilst Stuart and Terri don't depart until Sunday. At one point today there was serious doubt as to whether we would be able to get away as planned. Overnight, we had over two inches of snow which resulted in the airport being closed until 10am and a number of flights including BA's first shuttle from Heathrow being cancelled.  Things then looked better for our afternoon flight although it did become touch and go as to whether it would a) be able to get into Leeds Bradford and b) get back out!

It did get in but then followed a two hour delay when the weather closed in to approximately 300 metres visibility, the snow continued to fall, the plane required de-icing and then we sat at the end of the runway with the Captain contemplating a return to stand for further de-icing. A bit of a nerve jangler but in the end we took to the skies and landed into a snow free Heathrow where our planned five hour wait had turned into just three.  Every cloud has a silver lining.

For Linda and me this is our fifth visit to South Africa but the first time that we have rented a property and also the first time that we have travelled here with family or friends.  The property that is home for the next few weeks is owned by an ex BA Captain and it is only recently that he decided to rent it to people in the airline industry!  Obviously we didn't fulfil that category but it turned out that his son is a current BA pilot and that Sarah knew Nick and had actually flown with him.  That was good enough for owner Colin and the deal was done.

So here we sit at Stand C56 waiting to board our flight to Johannesburg.  We are actually going to Cape Town but were unable to get on either of the BA flights to that destination and so took this option.  All it means is that we hopefully get another BA flight which run every hour from Jo'burg to Cape Town.

An eleven hour flight beckons and yet again we are blessed with comfy seats in Club World.  We never forget just how privileged we are.