New Year 2008 !

There is not a lot to be said about the new years celebrations of 2008. It was a quite evening with friends at my mum’s house. We had a barbecue and champagne at 12h00.

For the past 8 years Adriaan (my bother) fell asleep while every one was celebrating the New Year. This year he was awake, enjoying champagne and entertaining every one with some firecrackers. It was the first time Jarot saw fireworks.

Happy new year everybody!

Chrismas 2007

December is always filled with Christmas get-togethers, the highlight is of cause Christmas Eve and Christmas day.

Christmas Eve was spend with Helgard’s family. Munda (Helgards’ sister in law) went threw a lot of trouble to make the evening rememberable. The Christmas table was set with a Christmas theme and the food was delicious.

The family members had an agreement that there wouldn’t be presents, but Helgard’s dad was Santa, didn’t listen to anybody and bought the whole family presents, thank you Santa Jerry. The Ross family is a caring family and it was nice to be between people that value their family and Christmas.

On Christmas day the cat was our alarm. He wanted some food so he maaued till Helgard got up; lucky for me I got coffee in bed. While we were drinking coffee Helgard gave me my presents. Helgard knows that I enjoy “bath time”, so I got a nice soft, white bath robe and some rose bath salt. Helgard is a Wii-fan, so he got another remote for his toy. We couldn’t spend too much time in bed, because the church service was at 8 o’clock. The church service was something special and when we sang Silent Night I could feel the love and peace of the day in my heart.

At the Reyenke’s house (my family) the food especially the meat is very important on Christmas day. Adriaan put some lamb and pork in the Weber and my mother did the rest of the cooking in the kitchen. It is always nice to have a little one in the family when it is Christmas because they really enjoy Christmas. Jarrot enjoyed the presents, sweats and swimming pool.

The evening Helgard and myself were tired. It was nice to feel the peace and love of the day when I fell asleep in his arms.
More photos here

Kayak on Klip River

After the excitement we had last time on the Kip river See (Too much of a good thing) It was decided that more time will be spent on scouting out the route to prevent us from spending too much time in the water. Gert and I used Google Earth to measure the distance we wanted to go and this time it came to 15.43 km which is much more respectable for a leisurely Saturday cruse.

We arrived at 9h30 at the launch spot and asked at the neighboring houses if we could leave the cars in their yards. In the mean time Gert phoned and told us they bring along two more guys too and they are on their way to leave one of their cars at the end our river journey. The previous time we saw a caravan park and picked it to be our end point. To Gert's surprise the caravan park was deserted, gates locked and nobody to be seen. A small problem because this is now the planned end point, fortunately he found a friendly guy in the street busy mowing his lawn. Gert struck up a conversation and the guy and he borrowed Gert his gate key. The caravan park is between the river and the back of his property, looks like everyone in the street has a key for accessing the back of their yards.

Eventually we launched and Sybie and Morné joint us on their wave boards. There are a couple of differences to our kayaks. We sit inside, they sit on top. We have a lot of space to pack tents and food and beer, they can bring along an apple and a bottle of water. Their boards are wider than the kayak, so sometimes we crossed obstacles a bit faster. Their boards are on top of the water so they turn much faster than we could. At the end of the day it does not matter for what we did the day.

This was the first time all of us went kayaking after the notorious killer rapid. Too be honest I wasn't in a hurry to go down the first rapid we came across. It looked like nobody wanted to go down the rapid. Eventually all of us made it through.

The next bigger rapid we crossed a tree trunk was placed nearly in the middle of the rapid and Sybie was unfortunate to make contact with it. Ursula was also swimming and bumped her knee again. After fishing everyone out on the riverbank we took a break for a byte. Sybie took quite some time out to recover from his injury while Dalené tried to help.

There was definitely more water in the river, and more tree trunks was in our way, looks like there was a lot of water down the river since the last time we saw it. The water was very muddy and it is better not to think too much of what may be lurking beneath.

Dalené was still trying to come to grips with her engagement ring.

Eventually we came to our deserted caravan park and the last rapid of the day. It was so nice Gert and I just had to do it a couple of times, for the experience….ok both of us wanted a white water picture.

When we tried to get out of the caravan park Gert realized that he left the borrowed key in his car, where he began our trip. Now they had to find a second person willing to borrow his key!

Eventually everything was sorted out with the cars and the equipment and we even had time to braai a nice big fillet steak.

What a day! More photos here