Thanks for joining us! Please don’t be ‘judarig’ about my grammer.. I will try my best to make the read as pleasant as possible 🙂

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

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So what do we know about camping? Actually started way back for me as an annual family tradition with my Granparents, Ouma en Oupa Kotze….

School holidays just started, and we are on our way to my mother for the December school holidays in the Strand. We could not wait for the weekend of 16 December to arrive, as this was normally the first day of camping at the Voortrekker Park, Strand. My uncle would arrive with his 2 ton pickup truck and everything would be on the back. So yes, we were not just camping, but were gonna ‘plak’ for the next 3 weeks!

The trees that make up site nr 413, already had the hooks for the roof and side panels permanently fixed! So every single cousin (7 – 10 in total) would grab a corner, and do as you are told. No time to greet your friends from the other sites yet or run to the cafe for a ‘bunnalick’. We have to set up camp first.

So we have a roof, site panels, ground sheet that covered the entire site, one big orange canvas tent in front for the children (all the poles were colour coded with tape so we knew which was for the roof and which was for the sides), one army tent behind it for aunty Joey (my grandmothers sister who she took care of), the kitchen behind her, and next to the “dining area”, we had my grandparents tent. In front the their tent, is where the red Ford car was parked (which she won completing a Kellogs Rice Crispies competition!). So the Ford and our tent (the orange one) was the ‘entrance’.

Boy, did we have fun! 3 weeks with Oupa Jan en Ouma Hester… You get to choose your own porridge, anything you like! We had the little book from the Post Office that gave the timetables of low and high tide for beach planning, no parents (they only came to visit in the evenings after work), no lights out, in the microwave was always bullybief snackwiches if we get hungry during the day, pocket money for the cafe where we played Streetfighter games, the students from Potch who make up the “Stranddienste” for the poppekas at 17:00 everyday.. i could go on and on, but you get the picture… As a kid, THE BEST HOLIDAY EVER!

What made it the best, was the planning from my grandparents that made everything run smoothly. Rainy days were spend in the big tent with a sheet of lego’s that kept us busy all day. But the roof cover over the entire site as well as the gutters we dug around the tents, made the experience of rain pleasant.

Fast forward to 2019…. Camping will be a lot less complex in setup, that is for sure. We would like to take you with us on our camping experiences through the Western Cape where we will show you what we took with us, our lessons learned, tricks and hacks and of course, the food we made 🙂

So we look forward to seeing you at our next blog, where we will discuss which tent we bought, as well as what we have to start our first camp.

Adventure is out there!!