The Land Down Under; All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go; Goodbye Z4, Hello Volvo CX 40; Stayin’ Alive; The End of the World as We Know it; Blue Skies Through the Tears
Bursting with travel plans for the rest of 2020, Roy and I arrived in Perth WA on 21 February from South Africa. (For the record, we’d come via Paris, Roy’s niece Charlie’s London wedding, a couple of days with my sister Dale and her family in Kent, and then six nights in Singapore.)
Several good hotels and spas are to be found in the green and pleasant Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. The newest and shiniest of these is Brahman Hills, designed for weddings and conventions but also geared for girly getaways.
A few days after Verne’s Big Birthday Bash* at the Oyster Box Hotel in Umhlanga, sister Dale and our mutual BFF Julie tore me from the bosom of assembled family and friends for a magnificent Midlands Meander birthday treat. (Click here,here, here, here and here – what, so many? – for posts on previous meanderings.)
(*Scroll down to the end for a whole lot of party photos, if you feel so inclined. Plus a gratuitous video of the author busting a move.)
The Morrises and The Ivy; friends, family and the three-day Fish Rule; England’s Rose Freehouse; The Real Ship Inn at Sandgate; Eurotunnel to Calais; Beaune again
Sometimes, we leave Karanja in her home port of Moissac and go off for a while. From what we got up to in August, here’s a trio of sister-centric outings, in the UK and in France.
While visiting my sister Dale and her family in Kent, England, she and I did a couple of day trips – first to Shoreham village and The Mount Vineyard, and then to Herne Bay. Then Roy and I went back to the Dordogne to meet up with his younger sisters Lyndsay and Cheryll.
#1 Shoreham (Kent)
You have to specify Shoreham (Kent) because there’s another one – Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex.
Summer itinerary; travel travails; party people; broken bones; fetching the Twingo; music in Montech
Summer plans
So, after two months in Durban, what’s on the cards for the next four months in France aboard Karanja? Nothing hectic, it must be said. We’ll start the cruising season by heading eastwards along the Canal de Garonne to Toulouse, and spend a week in that lovely city. Then we may continue along the Canal du Midi to Castelnaudury for a few nights, before retracing our steps back to Montech. There, you can join the Canal de Montauban, which takes you to – you guessed it! – Montauban.
Flashback to August last year, aboard Karanja on the Tarn River
It’s not often enough that my beloved sister, our BFF Julie and I get together, what with Dale living in London, Julie in Durban and me all over the place. When we do, revisiting the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands Meander has become a tradition – even if we have only one day for it.
And so the Three Mustgetbeers of old, with trusty Julie at the wheel of her Toyota RAV4, set off early one weekday morning for the KZN Midlands. The mission: to revisit a couple of favourite haunts and possibly find a few others.
The Brasserie at The Edward; Fig Tree at Simbithi Eco Estate Golf Club; curry buffet at The Oyster Box
While in Durban, Roy and I tend to eat out nearly as often as at home. For one thing, it’s relatively affordable. For another, I seem to become lazier by the year when it comes to the sort of dinner-party entertaining I used to do so effortlessly (as I remember it, anyway). Let someone else do the kitchen slog.
Getting the Twingo to Villeton; skinning a cat in Nérac; snail soirée in Damazan; petrol-pump wine in boozy Buzet; three canal-side resto reviews; Bastille Day – let them eat paella; Allez les Bleus!
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Karanja’s 4.3m width being too wide for the river Baïse locks, we’d have to explore Nérac (see the featured photo above) and area a different way – by car. That entailed getting a train to Moissac to fetch the Twingo from its garage.
First, we’d have to find a place: (a) where we’d be happy to leave the boat while fetching the car, and (b) with good train links to Moissac. That place turned out to be a hamlet called Villeton.
Villeton is just 12km and two locks from Buzet – Berry and La Gaule. Going downstream, just before the bridge at PK146 is La Fallotte, which has pegs and free mooring. (Remember this for the return journey in a few weeks’ time.)
