Cape Town, South Africa

After a semester at home, it was time to repack and hit the road again.  The Sunshine Nomad takes her handle seriously, and four months at home was a good plenty.  Compared to last year though, this around-the-world journey had a couple of tweaks and new goals: 1) a semester of teaching in Vienna, and 2) including more friends, family, and students in and out of the travel squad.  While there were new essentials for this trip, one mantra remained the same… always take the long and curvy road.  To live the mantra, we started our trip to Vienna with a stop in South Africa—right on the way according to our map.  To meet our goal of more family, we were lucky to have Kelton and Grandpa John join us for five weeks.  We were celebrating Kelton’s December graduation from Georgetown and especially enjoying time with him before his student lifestyle morphed into a career with a finite number of vacation days.  Grandpa John, on the other hand, claimed all the stockpiled retiree vacation days, got an arm full of vaccines, and rewrote the novel Around the World in 80 Days, to the much more impressive personal narrative, Around the World at 83 Years.

Cape Town was an unbelievable first stop.  It is effortlessly hip and those clouds rolling over Table Mountain—well, simply mesmerizing.  We enjoyed climbing Lion’s Head, sampling our way through the Farmer’s Market (two times in fact), visiting Robben’s Island, eating at the fabulous Pot Luck Club, taking a Malay cooking course, visiting the wine country and enjoying an authentic braai with new friends.  I am not going to lie, we were pretty excited we made local friends straight away.  The spirit, humor and friendliness of South Africans is noticeable and refreshingly fun. Lesson learned—just invite people over more often. It’s just fun and interesting. Oh, and the Table Mountain view….did I mention the view?  Yep, it just doesn’t quit.  We will definitely be back!