Matatiele to Camperdown – 25th February 2016

We are ecstatic – last day of travelling!! Four hours to get home and we are more than looking forward to that! 258 kilometres – it seems so far away. Freedom and I munch on the last of the sandwiches – thank goodness – and we discuss all manner of things political, family relations, past events, anything that will keep the energy moving and get us home.

Towns fly past until that last stretch that just seems too far – Richmond to Camperdown. The roads are not the best – in fact the roads on this entire trip have been atrocious – pothole repairers these days don’t seem to get the concept of making the repair the same height as the existing road. They are either filled well below or well above the existing levels. So be it then – maybe that is the way things are done, but the body takes huge strain as one bounces and jounces along.

Then it happens – our driveway appears and we spill out onto the concrete, aching in every bone and just thrilled to finally be home.

We start the unpacking process, which is always, somehow, worse than the packing to go. Two hours later the washing machine is burbling away with washing, all the containers are washed, dried and packed away and we finally get to sit down and relax with a cup of tea. Not for long – now we have to offload the 2 AGA’s – out comes the gantry and the one whole AGA if lifted off the trailer. It is now that we see that it has been damaged by the accident and will require much more effort than we had anticipated to restore. The trailer too, has not been fixed correctly – the bolts holding the fronts of the new springs were not in place and on the one side the lug that the bolt would have gone into had sheared off completely. We are grateful that nothing happened again, due to this negligence.

It is a very true saying that, when you are given the responsibility of fixing something where a person would be exposed to danger, always imagine that it was you who you were working for – not just another ‘customer’.

We are quite stunned by these latest developments and retire sadly with the knowledge that a lot of further work and expenditure lies in front of us.

Simply another day in the life of the AGA Lady!!!