Travel days - Himeville to Queenstown to Graaff-Reinet

Wednesday morning we got up reasonably bright and early to pack up and head out for our longest travel day, from Himeville to Queenstown (in Eastern Cape).  Truth to tell, we weren’t all that bright, because for two nights in a row scheduled “load shedding” power outages shut off our CPAP devices (we both have sleep apnea) between 2am and shortly after 4am.  John can’t sleep at all without the CPAP, so we spent the time listening to an audiobook while awaiting the restoration of power.  Argh!

After a second evening of thunderstorms and heavy rain, the skies were still cloudy and the humidity high as we left Karmichael Farm.

We took the fairly direct  secondary highways on the advice of our B&B host - lots of scenic mountain views.  Lots of potholes, too, until we crossed the state line into Eastern Cape.  Road maintenance varies widely from state to state.

We stopped for a nice lunch in Maclear, and enjoyed the partly sunny skies as we continued on our way  - until suddenly we came over a ridge to see the blackest sky imaginable.  We knew what that meant, and we knew we wouldn’t make it to Queenstown before the storm hit.  

As the rain and hail pounded down harder and harder, and the wind gusts began to buffet our wimpy Kia, we pulled over to wait out the worst of it.  The rain finally let up enough that we could see well enough to continue on, but it was still coming down hard when we finally made it to our B&B (after taking the “scenic route” through the middle of town in rush hour traffic because someone had set the GPS wrong 🤭). We dragged our suitcases in and decided to skip going out for dinner.

Thursday morning dawned bright and sunny - downed leaves and standing water were the only evidence of the previous night’s storm.  Our B&B has a generator that kicks in automatically whenever the power goes out, so we enjoyed lights and operational CPAPs all night.  

We left Queenstown and headed out into the Karoo (high desert), where the trees gave way to grasses, sagebrush, occasional cacti, and “forests” of aloes.     Everything is very green - apparently there’s been a lot of rain here, too.

We stopped for a picnic lunch along the road in a mountain zebra preserve.  

I heard the screechy braying sound that zebras make, and John used his dandy new binoculars to look for them.

No luck - at mid-day they were probably resting in the trees.  We did see a few antelope, but the most prevalent wildlife in this area seem to be termites -

Termite hills are everywhere - in some stretches of grassland they look like a field of hay bales!

We got to our next stop - Graaff-Reinet  - by early afternoon and checked into our B&B.  It’s a nice place, but we were amused by the description of the hot water system -

A gas geezer?  I really hope that’s not what it sounds like!