Let me introduce you to Aardwolf, she is the closest we have to a home for the next few months. It’s pretty amazing the number of dimensions I have to get used to to treat her right – I drive her on the wrong side of the road, sitting on the wrong side of a car, using a stick I don’t usually use, and the stick is on the other side of every one I have tried in the past, she is bigger, heavier and more top loaded then what I usually drive and she is overloaded in the rear. With all that, I am slowly learning to properly coax her to do what I need.

We took her around the Cape for our first date visiting the penguins at Boulder Beach (we ate lunch with two Avital and Eliav named Snaps and Jealous) and driving down to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope. She and I didn’t quite see eye to eye for a bit, particular in the painful traffic getting out of Cape Town but we are slowly getting to know one another and are now at least as functional as most marriages. The hardest, or at least most prominent, adjustment is definitely being on the same side of the road as other cars going my direction – and remembering which side of the car I am on so I don’t keep drifting into the next lane (or curb).

It turns out our kids take after me, if they see a rock they want to climb it and if they see an ‘adventurous’ path they will always choose it over the trail. It’s great that this keeps them entertained, and nobody wants them to get comfortable off-trail more than me, but man can it be tiring. That said, despite some minor homesickness a couple of evenings, they have been quite good and engaged even when they insist they don’t want to do whatever it is we are about to do (and inevitably enjoying doing it).

Cape Town has been a very nice city. The area we stayed in, De Waterkant, is some sort of cross between San Francisco, Dupont and Auckland transported to South Africa – complete with the abundance of yuppies walking home holding their Yoga mats. We had the opportunity to explore its various communities and different histories from Bo Kaap to the old District 6. Its setting in the shadow of Table Mountain along the Atlantic is justifiably stunning and I fully appreciate how different it is from much of the rest of Africa. That said, I am happy to be on our way out to the countryside and away from city traffic and crowds. We are heading, via the Winelands, to the Little Karoo and Garden Route before turning north for Addo and Mountain Zebra parks and heading into Lesotho.