So much has changed in travel over the past few years.   While we haven’t been completely removed from the game, we did bring a kid into the Wandering crew and it has caused us to slow down our pace.  Add in the surprise global pandemic and it’s really a wonder we made it abroad at all.   But we’re here, on our favorite continent, dragging the world’s most accommodating little ginger along with our poor choices and testing his tiny legs to climb all the things. [Ed. Note: It is important to start early to instill a sense of climbing everything.]

Day one kicked off, of course, as high as we could get.   There’s a very large mountain that Cape Town surrounds the base of.  You can climb to the top, but considering the aforementioned tiny human with tiny legs and the small matter of stitches in his head last week (he is his clumsy mother’s child…) we decided to take the speed route up top on the spinning cable car.   The summer winds were gusting off the two oceans and rocking this red orb around the basin.   The surprise open windows with safety railings just above Mini’s head didn’t do a thing to appease my long standing fear of edges (not heights, I can go as tall as you want, I just need to be safely 20 feet inside the building with closed windows to breathe easy…)

Once we landed safely on the flat top of Table Mountain, the Boy scouted ahead for hikes to take.  His ambitious travel self likely hasn’t aligned with his real dad self quite yet and he proudly told me of the 45 minute (each way) trek that would take us the full route along the edge of Table Mountain top.  It was already 10 am in the summer sun for a jet lagged 3 year old, but we were giving this a try! [Ed. Look, the goal was to get to the highest point on the mountain top. We had made it this far, so time to get walking!] One hiccup to note — we gifted Mini our 11-year-old ‘point and shoot’ for Christmas to take his own photos along the trip…and his current subject of choice was rocks.  Every. Single. Rock. atop Table Mountain.   Fifteen minutes later, the Boy was not so patiently waiting at the trailhead while I wrestled the camera away from Mini and into my pack to have a few uninterrupted steps along the way.   

Table Mountain, and Cape Town, are simply stunning.   The juxtaposition of the pocket beach towns surrounding the base of a series of rocky cliffs mix some of the most interesting terrain I’ve encountered to date.  We managed to summit on the clearest day of our trip, so we could point out our Airbnb and the waterfront we’d visit later in the week, as well as scenic areas across a 360 view. While we couldn’t make the full path along, we did get farther along than I expected and didn’t have to carry Mini once! So far, an African adventure was looking good!