Family Time

Urgh. Back to reality. How unfortunate.

am feeling somewhat blue since my arrival back in Joburg. I think it always happens when I have to say goodbye to my family. It takes me a few days to get back into my "real life" again. That and there's something interesting I noticed that was going on in my head after spending so much time with all the oldies. These are great aunts and uncles who've been together practically their whole lives. I dunno, there's something telling about looking at 75+ yr old lives at play. What will I be doing at that age. Will I have a partner? Will I have children? Will I have grandchildren? It seems so far away and so close all at the same time.

Anyway, enough about that. So on Friday afternoon I headed off to Lanseria. Remind me not to fly via there again please. It took me just over an hour to get there before my flight. You know, it seemed like such a blessing, having this 2nd airport, when ORT felt like miles away and the airport restoration was chaos and what a pleasure to only have one flight checking in at a time :) Well nowadays the pleasure of Lanseria only exists within it's walls. The drive there is an absolute nightmare and doesn't seem to be improving at all. Give me the Gautrain any day! Considering the cost of parking at Lanseria from Friday afternoon till Monday evening was almost R300, the Gautrain does seem preferable, if you can get a lift there. Sigh, and the roads home from Lanseria are even worse in the dark. I would recommend everyone boycott Lanseria till they fix those awful roads!!

The flight to Durbs is such a pleasure, it's like about as soon as you've taken off you're getting ready for descent. Somehow the extra hour to Cape Town feels soo much longer. I met my cousin at the airport and we set off for small-town Natal, arriving around 10pm.

We had a lovely long weekend filled with family :) It was my grandfather's 80th birthday on Sunday and on Saturday we had plenty of the family round to celebrate with a lunch. Some of whom I'm not sure I've even met before!

We also managed to fit in a visit to the cemetery (where I got my own photo's of our old family gravestones - I think I'll have to revive my family history hobby again!) and a visit to the very small local museum (which is in the house my grandmother used to live in while her father was magistrate 1951 - 1955). I can't actually remember the last time we visited the museum.

As always, my favourite part of the weekend was hearing all sorts of old family stories from back in the day :)