This is certainly a land of great contrasts. And we probably went from one end of the spectrum to the other in the space of two days back in Cape Town. On Tuesday we went on a "Township" tour, and then on Wednesday we spent the day swanning around the wine region of Paarl-Stellenbosch-Franschoek. Slumming it one day and living it up large the next. Well we did see how the other half live on the Township tour, thats true. We started in the Malay quarter of Cape Town where the original governors houses were converted into slaves quarters when Indonesian slaves were imported to do the work centuries ago. The terrace houses are spectacular, trying hard to outdo each other in the brilliance of their colours - bright greens, blues and brilliant yellows. A bit ... read more

Well we are probably a good sleep away from being totally on top of our game still. Those flights had seemed fine on paper. No appointments on the Monday morning when we get back please Penny, I'd hate to fall asleep mid-meeting. But its great to be here. Jeff (brother) and Cornel have got a great set up. They live on the northern edge of the city out near all the wineries. Bugger. They are both engineers and Jeff has been busy sorting out roundabouts next to the new soccer stadium here. So when you are watching World Cup games from Cape Town look out for Jeff's roundabout - just outside the stadium. Anyway we decided to do something that I couldn't have done when I was here twenty years ago playing cricket. We decided to ... read more

We're now sitting in the departure lounge at LAX waiting for our plane. We've got about 3 hours. I just love these long waits at airports. All of us are a bit shot after an adrenalin-packed 5 days here. And today after a 2 hour wait in the que, we finally found Nemo. It was the one big ride we couldn't get on on our first day at Disneyland because the que was enormous and you can't use a fastpass to get onto it. Fot the other popular ones you can get a fastpass which gives you a set hour when you can go on that ride without having to line up with everyone else. So if you plan things you can get around most of it, which we did. We had 2 days (today ... read more

We've had a great couple of days here in the Santa Ynez Valley basically just swimming in the pool in between bouts of wine tasting. Now we're bracing ourselves for the Fourth of July celebrations tomorrow. We'll probably be settled into our new campsite on the other side of Santa Barbara by the time things get into full swing but whatever happens I'm sure it will be interesting because there are never-ending displays of rampant patriotism all over the place - I now know EXACTLY what the US flag looks like - big ones, little ones, ones on car aerials, ones on dog collars - if you have a special type of US flag you're looking for just let me know and chances are we've seen one like that in the past couple of weeks. ... read more

Its been quite a while since I last sat in front of a computer to update this travel blog. We've spent a lot of time in state parks with no internet access etc but now we're down the coast and I've found one and half an hour to start catching up. Jim & Laura's was great. really good to see them and their girls. When i last wrote we'd been down the river on a raft. Well after that we did a bit of wine tasting in Washington state, Susan did some outlet shopping, we did a bit of touristy stuff including the Discover centre which traces the jouner that Lewis & Clark took getting across to the wild west, and generally enjoyed ourselves there catching up. To add validity to Mitchell's claims about the ... read more