Family Vacation: South Africa!

Part 1

March 2006 my husband comes home from work and tells me we are going on vacation… to South Africa!… (with his parents!?!) After the shock wears off I freak: how can we afford it on his income? He assures me we can afford it; he just played every wedding he could get his hands on. And the boys are going to miss a month of school!

Flash forward… October, November, and December
Me pessimistic; thinking about living with his parents for a month, a 24 hour travel day with three boys, and a country that is a totally different culture where smoking is still acceptable and people are still very racially charged. I made myself crazy.

Why Cape Town? My husband was born and raised in Cape Town South Africa as a “Cape Coloured.” He left in ’89, just as the apartheid mess started to explode. He was twenty, and already in college, when his parents, three brothers and grandma made the move across the Atlantic. He lived through so much as a coloured South African, and his family decided that living in Canada would be better for all of them. So going back to Cape Town for vacation was a reunion of sorts for him, and the boys’ first time meeting cousins that have the same last name as them.

We arrived to family and friends twenty-four hours after we left Pearson airport. The boys were amazingly well behaved, even though we had an eight hour stop-over in Heathrow; I over packed our carry-on, but what else is new?

That night we celebrated New Years in Cape Town, with extended family and friends, with views of the ocean, the mountains and farms!

A view from Aunty Meagan’s house, vineyards to the right and ocean to the left. Every morning I sat here with my cup of coffee and a book.

Ethan, Me (Tara), Raoul, Liam and Gavin enjoying Bikini Beach in Gordon’s Bay Cape Town still jet legged, but who can resist the call of the ocean?

Tara is an urbanmoms.ca member and active contributor on the forum. Check back over the next two weeks for parts 2 and 3 of her South African Family Vacation travel diary.