The Great Occasional Downhill Bike Ride to Lilani Spa – The GODBiRitoLS.
Named after the fashion of the more famous GABRAN (Great Annual Bike Ride Across Natal), this one is much better! All downhill; Only a gentle 17km; Perspiration-free; Ends before tedium can set in at a rustic old hot water spring with spa baths! In which you can drink cold beer if you keep your elbow up and your chin just out of water. One inch in front of your belly button: Warm water; One inch behind your belly button: Cold beer. Kinda how I imagine heaven might be.
After, getting back out of the valley is done with the bicycles strapped to the back of the bus – kombi power, not pedal power for uphill travel. Nice and Easy!
This time Aitch drove the kombi, stopping frequently to take pictures, while I shepherded the unruly mob down on mountain bikes. Both of them. My kind of gravel cycling – downhill, downhill, seventeen kilometres of continuous downhill! Don’t ever have to push a pedal in anger. Nor do you need to touch your brakes if you can lean with confidence. Wheee!
– Catch Ma, TomTom! –The Family
The accompanying bus was fully equipped with bike racks, a fridge, a picnic hamper, chocolate bars, cold drinks and a supportive Ma. Luxury.
Just got back last evening. Nine slow hours there on Thursday, and nine hours back today. Dawdled through the Oos Vrystaat. Saw jackal (Tommy spotted him just outside Clarens), mongoose, springbok, blesbok, hartebeest, white-tailed gnu, zebra, grey rhebok, and lotsa birds. Sterkfontein full to the brim and looking blue as the sky. Fascinating to think beneath those clear waters is Nuwejaarsvlei, the farm my Mom was born on in 1928. Lived there till she was eight.
The air was crystal clear, we could see every detail of the Malutis and the ‘Berg. Here’s the whole High Berg from Sentinel to Giants Castle (click on the pic).
– all of the High Berg – seen from the top of Oliviershoek Pass –
Kids were a pleasure. Jess took a friend Savanna, and they giggled and ogled the ski instructors non-stop. The Naudes joined us again, so Tom had Joshua and we had James and Michael, old-time skiers all, now – *yawn*!
Ma Michelle took to skiing like a duck to water and won all the bum boarding races hands-down. Must be technique, as I thought my superior attraction to gravity would beat her, but no.
Car Trouble! Craig had car trouble and spent two nights in Ficksburg after we’d all left!! He took his new black Jeep CherryOkie and burnt out the starter motor trying to ignite frozen diesel. Ernest the resident Afriski diesel mech (he keeps the Pisten Bullys going) tried, but no go, so a flatbed truck was summoned from Ficksburg, land of the Cherry Cherry beauty contest.
Before the flatbed arrived, he borrowed my bakkie and took his vrou Michelle and three boys to the Free State Holy City by the River Jordan (OK, Bethlehem). Hired a car for them, so they got back to Westville one night before we did (Monday night). He got back to Afriski late Monday, just before Braam arrived wif ve flatbed. R3600 later the Jeep was dropped on (or off) a jack at the Ficksburg auto-electrician’s, cracking the sump. So Craig is still in F’burg, two nights later. F*ckit, I think he said . . .
The Resort: Afriski is MUCH more organised now that PIN (the guys I bought thru) have 51% and management control.
This was our seventh trip, so I’m happy we’ve made good use of it. The kids still look forward to it all year – they’re already plotting next year! And they always ask, “Can we go again in the holidays?” and I have to explain how it costs a stack if you go out of your allocated week.
I paid R125 000, so still expensive, but getting less each year! The big question will come when we decide to sell! (update 2020: Well, COVID lockdown played havoc with the resort’s finances; if it survives – it’s touch and go – it’ll be a while before we’ll be able to sell ).
Our chalet is very comfy, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a big lounge, 12 beds. Lovely kitchen, well-equipped. About 500m from the slope, so we get plenty of exercise in the thin air!
Eye Candy: On our last day six gorgeous shapely models arrived for a photo shoot and had a ski lesson. It was a glorious bright sunny day so they all wore skimpy tops and I had to check up on the kids wif me binocs.
Safely on the fringes of the action, Swanie the flank for the Feisty Fourths, who led the cheerleading as they ran on, keeps a comfortable distance between himself and the ball carrier – friendly or hostile. Last to arrive at the scrums, and last to retreat when the opposition gets a penalty. Reluctantly, backwards, with a WTF expression.
Lots of advice for his teammates, he goes quiet when play unexpectedly veers in his direction. Twice he got the ball, and I must admit, made some progress and passed successfully both times. So I could praise him after the game in good conscience.
And they won. Against Penzance.
And yesterday against Chelsea. They’ve broken the trend and are on a two match winning streak.
Gotta have a man-to-man talk about tackling, and about strolling – STROLLING – casually from scrum to scrum, like a spectator. Hopefully he’ll listen. He doesn’t have a high opinion of bum-sniffers, as he calls locks and 8th men. That’s him kneeling on the right in the top picture.
The little-known 2013 Elston Place Olympic Games was a thing. Games I. Not XVI or XXII. No, I.
Tom earned 2 golds (run & soccer ball); Lungelo earned 2 golds (swim & cycle) ; One event was drawn (stone throw); Therefore they ended up Equal Olympic Champs!
– the offical Olympic Timekeeper’s station – with those stones visible –
The Games started officially with four Olympians; then one competitor DNF and one withdrew to go home for lunch.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Stone throwing was interesting. I found ten smooth, small-egg-sized stones in Aitch’s stuff. She had lots and lots of all sizes. I upended an outside black bin and placed an empty 10kg HTH bucket on it, also upended. I placed this target about 8m from a walkway so there’d be no encroaching – there was a clear place to stand. I then gooi’d five stones at the HTH bucket and hit it five times. I did grow up in Herriesmif and gooi’ing fings wif a stone was a fing, I’ll admit.
Tom stepped up; Five throws, five misses. Some by a puzzling large margin. Lungelo sniggered, stepped up: Five throws five misses. Some quite literally by about 4m at 8m distance! I had to give frowing fings wif a stone lessons before they started hitting the bucket occasionally! Bloody mis-spent youth they had, it would appear!
These two are so cool we had icicles on the rafters
and homework was done
~~~oo0oo~~~
Terry Brauer wrote Feb 2013: This so reminds me of Pinaster Street Olympics, FA cup finals – cricket, soccer, tennis, ad nauseum – Ryan and Deon!!
The man has decided its rugby this year, so I get lots of tackle-talk and tales of dragging tyres across the field.
Went to fetch him yesterday and watched a while. He’s going to get a crick in his neck from looking up at the other guys. At least he was catching and passing well with the ball all slick in the drizzle.
He has a new name among the rugger ous now:
.
.
Swanie
– third standing fella from left –
~~~oo0oo~~~
They lost a few games – this one:
. . but then won this game against Penzance and started winning most of their games after that.
Early morning start in Hillcrest for the 35km downhill cruise.
Whizzed down the hill again this year, with TomTom keeping up his undertaking not to whinge once. He didn’t.
And he beat his Dad across the line.
Jess got the family gold, though, tiring of the dawdling boys and zooming off in the last few km’s as always.
Sheila dropped us off in Hillcrest again, and we fetched the bakkie at her flat after the “race”. The steepest uphills are those after the finish – from the Moses MaFIFA stadium to her flat – after breakfast!
Absolutely not, I told Aitch. Forget it. I’ll pull a hamstring, I told her. NO WAY.
So I line up for the Dad’s 100m race at Livingstone Primary School. Me and twenty other Dad’s half my age. I’m wearing long pants, long-sleeve shirt and a tie. I’ve removed my leather shoes. Typical delusion of just maybe I can do well at this. After all my time of 11 seconds dead stood for over twenty years and how much can one deteriorate from sixteen to fifty five? Sure, I had probably slowed down a bit, but the question was How Much?
I politely fall back into the second row on the grid to let the pushy okes ahead. There should have been seeding races so I could get pole position AND THEY’RE OFF!
Within five metres I’m four metres behind so I deliver my famous kick and start the dreaded Hamstring Hop. I TOLD her, but did she listen? From the roar of the crowd I hear one distinctive loud peal of laughter rising above all the hundreds of shouting voices.
By the time I finish the three young adonis’ that got gold silver and bronze have already left the podium.
So we enter the 19km event at Karkloof on our pushbikes. Me n Jessie.
Aitch n Tom are going to do the 10km.
We head off and Jess does well, stays on her bike on some gentle uphills, no pushing.
Riding up one hill after 4 or 5 km we hear a whooshing sound, and a wheezing and a loud shoosh and huh and a muttered curse and I realise its not a train or a wind turbine, it’s an oke saying “Spekkies – howzit?”. Young David Hill, peaking this early. He’s let himself go, as they say, since last season when he did Tuli in Botswana and was a shadow of his former self, and is paying the price. Finds his bike has lost all its former zippiness.
We rode together a while, but then gravity took over and off went Hill downhill at an ever-increasing speed on his high-tech multi-shock softail plenty thousand Rand special just when Jess ran out of steam and decided to chill a bit.
Hill’s bike
After another few kays I realised I was probably leading my category and was in for a podium finish and a prize: First SLOBO home (Seriously Lazy Old Bald Optometrists division). Jess was OK on the downhills (if rather cautious) and slow on all uphills – including some sections of “Dad, come back and push my bike for me”. Even so, I thought I had the win in the bag and was rehearsing my acceptance speech when, with much creaking and panting, an OLDER, BALDER optometrist pulled up next to me and called out “Swanepoel!” It was young Graham Lewis, who, although MUCH older than me, was probably competing for my crown! I tried to delay him but he was eager to move on, so – although I could have blown his doors off – I let him go (on his twenty year old, unsprung bottle store delivery fiets, with his knees whizzing past his ears his seat was so low) as I had to wait for Jess. Ah, well, silver medal, I thought.
Lewis’ bike
Meantime, back at the 10km, Aitch was waiting for 24yrs of trouble on six legs – Tom and the Bainbridge twins Peter and Philip. And waiting, and waiting. Hordes of cyclists passed her as she looked back in vain. Fifty, sixty of the slowcoaches they had been ahead of went past. “Have you seen three little boys?” she eventually started asking. Someone had: “I saw three little guys lying down in the grass near the drinks table chatting away” said an observant soul. Back went Aitch to roust them out and get them back on their wheels. “We were talking, Ma” was the explanation.
Just before prize-giving I had a thought and scurried over to have a quiet word with the officials. “First SLOBO home: Swanepoel” came the announcement over the tannoy system, and I stepped onto the podium to receive gold – to tremendous applause. Lewis had been disqualified, and quite rightly so. He’s running the Comrades ultra-marathon again this year, which quite clearly ruled him out on the important “SL” part of the category. Justice had prevailed.
