Pick-n-Pay and Woolworths were just down the street from our house, so we stopped there after visiting the waterfront for some quick groceries and some charcoal for the braai, and cooked a simple dinner to eat in the house while we enjoyed the sunset views over the ocean. Planning this dinner was actually a challenge because of the daily electrical blackouts throughout South Africa. We downloaded an app that tells us when each day’s blackouts will occur in our section, but sometimes they’re at very inconvenient times. This day, one of the blackouts was from 6-8:30 pm, so we had to have everything cooked no later than 6 pm. We managed…with seconds to spare.
After an early night to bed, the day Adri, Josh, and I had been anticipating the most arrived! We were up at 6:30 am to grab an Uber to Table Mountain to meet our guide by 7:45. We hiked up a rocky path to a climbing point, where we were given very detailed instructions about how we were going to trad climb as a group of 4. Our guide, Kai, was extremely talented at managing the 3 ropes we had to negotiate as we made our way up the side of the mountain one-by-one in stages. Kai would go first, setting 2 sets of cams, followed by me, cleaning up the cams on my rope, followed by Adri and then Josh cleaned up the rest of the cams for his rope. The route we took was pretty easy for us, which was both a relief and a slight disappointment. We decided that for our first trad climb up a mountain, it was probably good to feel so secure. Regardless, it was great fun and a whole lot of exercise.
Meanwhile, David Luke and David went golfing at Milnerton Golf Club. This is a links-style club located right along the coastline of the ocean, with great views of Table Rock in the background. They loved the course, but had to contend with the challenge of adjusting their game to extremely windy conditions.
In the afternoon, we strolled out to one of the little secluded cove beaches along our waterfront. The water was very chilly, but refreshing for a quick dip, followed by relaxing on the sand and soaking in the views we couldn’t stare at too often.
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