April 7, 2025
Our first travel day in 3 weeks! After staying put in Cape Town to kick off our trip, we’re excited for a change of pace and look forward to seeing more of the South Africa. We’re starting a road trip east along the garden route. We have 4 stops, each for 3-4 nights and ending at Plettenberg bay before flying north for safari.
After a failed attempt to wash and dry all of our dirty clothes this morning, we checked out of our Airbnb around 11am. We are resigned to the fact that half our clothes are damp and we’ll see what we can do when we arrive at the hotel.
We attempted one more viewing of Cape Town at the top of signal hill but were again blocked by clouds. When we drive down, it seemed the only part of the city with cloud cover was signal hill. Even our waiter at lunch remarked on how strange the clouds were today.
We ate lunch at Blue Cafe which was a nice way to bookend our time in Cape Town as this was the very first restaurant we visited the morning after we arrived. The kids both got the same meals as day one, got coloring sheets from our server and then bickered over the coloring sheets— just like last time. This is the only restaurant we repeated other than Cafe Paradiso. And Oswald’s bakery which we went to a handful of times.
Before hitting the road, we had to stop at Oswald’s once more for coffee and pastries. Sadly, they had sold out of cinnamon twisties :(
The first stop of our garden route road trip is a small town called Stanford that is just over 2 hours from Cape Town. On the drive, Len slept most of the time and the rest of us started to listen to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Ollie’s selection/ demand). The drive was thankfully uneventful save for the last ~5km which was on a terribly bumpy dirt road that rattled our little hatchback intensely. The boys loved it.
We saw signs to look out for frogs and caracals— wild cats with pointed ears. Kyle saw an antelope (?) on the drive but otherwise no animal sightings on the road.
On arrival, we checked out the clubhouse. All the meals are served here and it has an upstairs kids’ play room equipped w foosball, ping pong, pool table, legos, games and books. The kids are welcome to go play upstairs while their parents enjoy a slower, and likely more peaceful, meal.
The hotel offers a ton of activities like tubing, knee boarding, kayaking, sailing and riding ATVs along the dunes. The forecast doesn’t look great for the next few days, but we’re hoping to check off a least a few of these. The boys caught sight of the tube in one of the garages and are especially hopeful we can fit that in.
Our boathouse is called Stern and is the furthest from the clubhouse. The boys have been excited about staying in a hotel, but our setup here is not very hotel-like. We are in a two bedroom cottage with a full kitchen and incredible view of the mountains across Klein River Lagoon. The boys are looking forward to a bath in the great orange tub and so am I.
We then headed back toward the clubhouse for dinner but first checked out the jetty and the surrounding gardens. We were happy to see the sun poke through after a cloudy afternoon. On clear afternoons, the hotel hosts “sundowners” (essentially happy hour) on the jetty and we’re looking forward to that!
After dinner, Len got to help drive us home and he was elated. The boys are likely hoping for more rain so we have to continue driving to and from the clubhouse and then they can copilot again.
