Nobody believes me when I say that the 80 days thing is a coincidence. But it is.
We leave the day after Isabel's last exam and return the day before the first full day of school. 80 days.
Actually from take off to touch down at Winnipeg International is 79 days and 20 hours, but door to door from our house... precisely 80 days.

And a bit about the backstory. In 1993 after three years in veterinary practice Lorraine and I quit our jobs and backpacked around the world for eight months, doing everything from living in a cave in Greece (a very nice cave mind you) to camel trekking across the Rajastani desert to celebrating Christmas in Hong Kong to island hopping in Thailand to volcano climbing in Indonesia to living with a family in Samoa to... well, the list does go on and on. Everyone said, "Wow, that was the trip of a lifetime!" To which we responded, "Nooo! It can't be the only time we do that! It just can't be." We swore we would do something similar again when we had kids. It's 22 years later. Isabel is 13. Alexander is 10.
It's time.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Day 48 Dr Schott I Presume

Capetonians appear to be a friendly bunch, from Shadley, the car rental agent at the airport who cracked jokes in a singsong Indo - South African accent, to the various homeless guys on our street who call me "boss". Manitobans are also said to be friendly, so when a gentleman at the Bo Kaap Kombuis restaurant, an obscure hole-in-the-wall two blocks from our house, began chatting with us and we discovered that he had lived in Winnipeg for twenty years but returned to Cape Town to retire, conversation was easy and automatic. It turns out that as we spoke he began to look and sound more and more familiar... It turns out that I began to look and sound more familiar to him too... It turns out he used to have a beagle  named Penny...

The photos are from our neighborhood, Bo Kaap, a Crayola world strung along clutch smoking ultra steep cobbled streets. It is the center of the small Cape Malay community, who are not Malaysians, but the descendants of Muslim prisoners and slaves brought from various parts of Asia by the British two hundred plus years ago.

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