Day 1 - Flying to Cape Town...

Once we arrived in Cape Town, we had to wait for Lee to arrive, so we explored a little. One quite noteworthy element to the airport - and to nearly every other place we'd experience in Cape Town - was the ubiquitousness of the vuvuzela. My ears still ring in B flat because of that horn. People blew them everywhere, inside or outside. Lee finally arrived, and we went off to grab our car and head to the house we'd rented.

On June 19, Janie, Jason, and Carla all got into the Super Shuttle in D.C. expectant that we were going to quickly go to the airport, sit back, have a drink or two before we boarded the plane for Amsterdam. Little did we know that the Super Shuttle driver, who was already 30 minutes late to pick us up, had several other people to pick up, and that he would blissfully ignore his GPS directions while driving into the wrong part of town to pick people up. He finally, after doing laps around southern Washington, D.C., decided to call his last pickup and find out where she actually was. Once sorted, he headed slowly to the airport to drop us all off. Instead of arriving at the airport over three hours before our flight, we arrived about an hour and a half before the flight.

Fortunately, that was the worst part of our travel experience. We flew on KLM, and that was one of the best airlines we've ever encountered. The flight to Amsterdam was very uneventful. Janie watched movies while Jason tried to master backgammon and read a book. We have no idea what Carla did since she was in the row behind us, although we can confirm that she did not poke us incessantly the whole time.

Once in Amsterdam, it was early morning European time, so we went off looking for coffee. It is impressive how much better European and African coffee is than American coffee. Starbucks is a burnt example of what coffee should be; they could learn a lot from cafes in Europe and southern Africa. Anyway, coffee and croissants consumed, we boarded our next flight - the one that would take us to Cape Town.

On the plane were a ton of soccer-crazy Dutch. Yes, I know that the typical term is football, but in both the U.S. and South Africa, it's called soccer. The South Africans call it soccer to distinguish it from football, which is what they call rugby. Many were there to follow their team, as we would also get to do in the second match that we watched, so it was great to see that the Dutch were behind their team. So, too, was KLM, as they even dressed up their desserts!