Traveling Home

On Wednesday morning, we began the long trip home with a final drive in the rental car to the airport.  Cheryl was glad to relinquish her other side of the road driving duties.

We took a small jet to Johannesburg, and then had a 3 hour layover until we would get on our next flight.  It took over an hour to get our boarding passes (we had to show our proof of covid testing), and then went through two more layers of security before we could go to our gate, with about a half hour to spare.  This is a sprawling airport, and we pretty much traversed the length of it.  Exhausting.

Our flight was to JFK by way of Zurich on Swiss Air, leaving at around 8pm Wednesday to land after 6am on Thursday in Zurich, with a 9am flight to the US. A three hour layover in Zurich.

Unfortunately, there was a jet fuel shortage in Johannesburg because of the flooding in Durban earlier in the month. It was reported that they couldn't fully refuel long haul flights for the trip back. This was not a situation that would be resolved for weeks. United canceled one of their flights from Newark for that very reason, so we were wondering how Swiss would handle the situation.

The solution for Swiss, and for other airlines, was to fly to another nearby airport to fully fuel and then go on to the destination.  We ended up diverting to Namibia, landing and waiting for the one fuel truck there to fill us up, and then fly to Zurich.  A long flight got even longer.

We were pretty happy to be over the Alps:

The refueling diversion in Namibia narrowed the Zurich layover considerably, but with Swiss efficiency, we moved right through the terminal and made our flight to JFK, getting aboard more than 19 hours after we boarded our first flight in Cape Town.

Seven hours later, we were over the Massachusetts coast,

and over Long Island soon after that 

We landed before noon, got through the airport rather quickly, and made our way by public transit back to New Haven by 4:30.

With Remy’s help, home by 5pm, about 36 hours after we left Stellenbosch. Tired but happy.

Mastodon

A Day on the Wine Tram

On Tuesday, after an early stop to get Covid tested for our flight home, we collected Kelly and got an Uber to nearby Franschoek for the highly regarded Wine Tram.

The setup for this wine lover's day out is that buses and a tram take you around to various wineries for visits, tastings, and lunch.  Franschoek is a posh and beautiful little town, and is basically all wineries.  We'd wanted to do the wine tram since we got there but never got around to making the arrangements.  On this, our last day, we navigated the complicated schedule and made a plan.

We stopped at four wineries on our tour.  Each one had breathtaking vistas.

We sampled a lot of wine.

Along the way, I finally sampled biltong.  (Basically very high quality beef jerky.)

It was a great way to spend our last full day in Stellenbosch.

When the day was done, Cheryl focused on last minute shopping.  Her favorite shop was this lady's.  She sold African silk products in a small shop right next to our hotel in Stellenbosch, and would spend her days spinning and weaving the silk on the sidewalk outside. 

This was our last night in Stellenbosch.  It was a clear, starry night.  This was the view outside our room.

We will miss this place.