Back ome after Easter weekend...

We were lucky as a family to take time off and spend the long Easter weekend in the mountains of the Eastern Cape South Africa). We stayed close to Barkly East on a farm and roamed the small mountains between Lady Grey, Barkly East, Elliot and Rhodes driving on the passes in the rainy wet weather can be pretty hazardous.

Some of the erosion cracks throughout the valley...beautiful even if they are erosion...

Here are some piccies to show how beautiful that part of the world is, the Southern Western Drakensberg combines with some part of the Maloti range (borders Lesotho) ....I could easily go live there...however no Internet signal, no plain sms /mixit signal for the girls, and no TV...the girls moaned like hell but they survived 4 days....

The Kraai and Bell river valleys on the way through to Rhodes...small town only reachable by dirt/gravel road from whatever direction you come into..pretty close to the Tiffendell Ski Resort




Pretty rock outcrop hubbie and I dubbed Fish Rock on the way to Elliot

The green hills are full of these rocky outcropsthat glint in the sun and when you get closer you see they look like Sandstone outcrops.

Wedrove the 800+ kilometers down on early Friday morning, thinking most people would have been on the road the Thursday. Wel everyone and his dog was on the road Thursday but the rest of the country also decided to travelon Friday.It was astonishing how many people were on the road then, the petrol stations were all busy with cars standing in queues in every town we drove through...be as it may enough idiots were out on the roads too...amazing how they can drive in cloudy rainy weather and not even think of putting on the car headlights...

I also had to complete this huge monstrous Marriage Counselling assignment...had to finalise my report by the MOnday morning...so worked on it during the evenings...very interesting stuff (not my chosen field, just a year's study on the BA PSychology I'm doing part time distance learning)...we may be aware of how different cultures and languages and religions and upbringings influence our dailyactions in our married (and other) life, but sometimes we forget such things...just thinking about a few instrospective questions on my own marriage where hubbie and I are both South Africans, he Afrikaans speaking and I am English speaking, and what influence that has had on our marriage in terms of communication and whom misunderstand whom (especially regarding communication with in laws and extended family) and how we have had to adapt (I speak Afrikaans fluently and only speak English to the girls as my work, my community, everything here is Afrikaans) - I cannot imagine what bigger influence varying languages, cultures and religions have on such partnership - of course you can makie it work, but that's the thing - you have to always consider these differences, respect them, learn from them even and then make the marriage work...as I said pretty interesting stuff when one gets to the instrospection past the theory....(not to mention the ways we are brought up, and how certain things our parents did affect us, even if we don't think so...)- the assignment just brought all this theory to the fore for me...

So we have a long extended week off at home and month end 3 May..I'm looking forward to the (Already) doing nothing with the girls at home and then starting the studies at some ime for my first exam 17 May

Hope you all have a wonderful and safe week and see you round again soon...



LG