Sipho is 7 and in Grade 1. He is holding his kite.

Thokozani is 5 years old. He chose to show you his jelly fish.

Xoli is 5 years old and wanted to show you his jelly fish.

Koketso is 5. She had a blast making her spider.

Grade R’s current favorite book is Head to toe by Eric Carle.

This will be my last entry for this trip. We are at the airport, having just flown from Cape Town to Johannesburg. It is 7 PM. We started our journey at 11 AM and are now ending a four-hour layover before boarding our plane to Atlanta. From Atlanta we will go to Durham. Tomorrow morning, we will finally arrive at the Atlanta airport after flying 16.5 hours and then catching our short connecting flight back to Raleigh. Our flight from Johannesburg to Atlanta is longer than our trip here, because we are flying into a headwind rather than a tailwind.

We spent Tuesday touring Cape Town, just getting acquainted. We had asked where the best surfing was, as Ian was desperate to surf the world-famous beaches of Cape Town. We came upon a quaint beach town name Muizenberg and went into the local surf shop.

Ian and Seth were very excited, and we made reservations for Ian to take a surf lesson the next morning. That afternoon, we took a helicopter ride around the Cape, going from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. What an amazing flight. We were able to see the shoreline and all the places we had driven all along. We even saw some of the fabled South African penguins.

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I am sitting on a stone wall just outside of our room at Stellenbosch Fountain. It is 7 AM, and my family is still sleeping, getting some much-needed rest. There is a waterfall to my right that is fed from a natural spring on the top of the property. There are beautiful sharp mountains in my foreground that look like the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, yet just below them is a vineyard stretching out with row upon row of nearly ripe grapes. We have seen tractors towing large rectangle-shaped containers full of grapes. The harvest is being taken in now, and workers are preparing the grapes for processing. This region is said to have the best wines in all of South Africa; it’s this country’s version of Napa Valley, but far prettier. I see steep mountains with rolling hills covered with grapevines, extending to the coast where they meet incredibly blue water. (067, 068)
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