The journey down here wasn't without incident, the most embarrassing being me putting my very large foot in my very large mouth at London Heathrow! Why is it always me although I was trying to be charm personified at the time?
To explain the run up to what I will call "Hairgate", we travelled down to South Africa using one of Sarah's concessionary tickets which gives us priority for a Club seat if available. Bearing in mind the number of travellers down here post Christmas, we were not over optimistic but at least we had been confirmed down in World Traveller Plus which meant a guaranteed seat.
With five hours to pass in T5 before our flight to Johannesberg, I went in to check our booking online only to find that our seat numbers had changed! Normally this would only happen on boarding and
rather than wait another 90 minutes to discover the reason, I decided to enquire at the BA Customer Services desk.
The desk was staffed by two ladies, both blonde but one with her back turned to me. In my usual charming manner, I opened with "I'm sorry to bother you ladies but I wonder if you could possibly help me"? Well the lady with her back to me displaying the most beautiful and can I say, lustrous hair, turned around to display a rather fetching Tom Selleck like moustache! Yep, you got it, the lady was actually a bloke!
His colleague thought it very funny although he didn't look too impressed. Mind you, I probably compounded the problem by asking what shampoo he used to get such a divine sheen on his golden locks? In reality, I should have asked when was he getting his next haircut.
Embarrassment over, I was given the great news of an upgrade to a comfy seat and so, after a few issues with the gantry to the plane, we departed 55 minutes late, a lot of which was made up on the flight down.
It's bizarre just how small our world is, demonstrated by a brief chat I had on the flight with the Captain, Martin, who Sarah flew with many times when she was on her previous fleet of the 757/767. It just so happened that one of Martin's best mates is the son of Colin whose house we are renting for the next 6 weeks. Only a couple of days earlier, he had been viewing some drone footage of the property we were heading to and yet had no idea that this was our destination!
The final comment about the trip down relates to the short hop from Johannesberg to Cape Town courtesy of Comair, a BA franchisee whose planes are all identical to its partner airline. Well that's the norm but on this occasion, they had to substitute our aircraft at the last minute and waiting for us on stand was a very old 737 painted in Dulux brilliant white.
Boarding reaffirmed it as an old plane. You only had to take one glance at the duck tape holding things together and the ash trays in the arm rests! Oh, and the outside toilet!
It didn't do much for Linda's nerves, particularly as she doesn't enjoy flying quite so much nowadays. Me? I'm a complete fatalist and always work on the basis that if the flight crew are happy to operate the aircraft, then that's good enough for me.
So here we are, safely at the NH Lord Charles in Somerset West, welcomed like old friends and at the start of our holiday in a place we truly love.
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