Cape Town Capers
January 2019
Cast (it’s the usual one!)
Me: Shaun, 50’s, loves travelling, eating and drinking (not necessarily in that order!)
Alison: 50’s, ditto to the above!
So, here we go again, another year another trip.
We tend to live by the quote “I haven’t been everywhere yet, but it’s on my list”.
We travel a lot for various reasons that I’ve highlighted before but in case you’re new to our reports here’s a quick summary: -
• Travel is our thing – not big houses, cars or designer stuff (we don’t have the body shape!)
• Don’t want to leave travel until retirement – who knows that we’ll be physically able to do it.
• We both work full time and the kids both work full time so little dependency on us
• I lost my Mum and Alison lost her Dad in the last 2-3 years, and it just made us realise how short life is. We want to live life to the fullest!
• We want to maintain BA Gold status and earn Avios – a bit of a head vs. heart conundrum
• We have a couple of blogs / websites that we subscribe to and jump on any bargains that may come up.
• Travel is as much fun as the destination for us, we don’t necessarily need to go direct from A to B in fact we are happiest going indirect to see other places and sights.
Ok, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but it’s the way we roll.
We do like to have a trip booked up for the New Year as something to look forward post-Christmas as the early months of the year are normally pretty bleak and it’s a long time until the summer.
We were searching for something suitable when we noticed a BA sale, First Class return to Cape Town at an astonishing price. The cost was quite a bit more than we’d normally pay but neither of us needed much persuading – let’s splurge and go for it!
We’ve not flown first class before and never been in the Concorde lounge at Heathrow T5 before either so it’s going to be a trip of firsts for us.
Surprisingly for us we are going direct from Heathrow to South Africa, no positioning flights to some far-flung European city this time round.
We decided to travel via Johannesburg on the outbound leg (this is so that we’d get to leave from Terminal 5 at Heathrow thereby getting access to the Concorde Lounge, plus we’d get to fly first class on the A380), then direct from Cape Town to Heathrow on the inbound leg (because we’d then get to fly on a 747 – these are getting towards the end of their lifetime so really we want to travel ahead of the pilot once in our lives).
We booked with a car as well – so we only needed to pay a deposit until 5 weeks beforehand.
PRE-FLIGHT
So, as we are flying First that means we get a number of benefits that we’ve never experienced before. One of these is actually going into the Concorde Room (CCR) at Heathrow T5, another is the ability to pre-book free spa treatments
FLIGHTS
BA0055 Heathrow to Johannesburg Seats 1A and 2A
BA6409 Johannesburg to Cape Town Seats 3A and 3C
BA0058 Cape Town to Heathrow Seats 1A and 1K
We decided to split the stay between central Cape Town and Frankschhoek (in the wine region) and we booked the following hotels:
HOTELS
Taj Cape town
taj.tajhotels/en-in/taj-cape-town/
Luxury Room. Tower Wing. City View, 40 Sqm. Balcony. King Bed
La Cabrière Country House – Franschhoek
lacabriere.co.za/
Middagkrans Mountain View room
ATTRACTIONS – nothing yet booked
It’s going to be a low key and less full on commando style trip but possible things include: -
Cape Point
Robben Island
Cape Penguins at Boulders Beach
Table Mountain
Victoria and Alfreds Waterfront
Wine tram tour in Frankschhoek
Swim with seals