Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

It’s here. Our last day. In some ways I feel ready for our visit to be over. It’ll be nice to get back to routine, our space and our home people. In so many other ways I’m terribly sad it’s over. This place and these people are so special to me that it’s always difficult to say goodbye. Plus it’s winter at home and we all know how I feel about that.

For our last full day we headed to Boschendal in Franschhoek. It looked gorgeous, had a huge picnic lawn with bean bag chairs and plenty of trees, a playground and a splash area. The full package.

We had a great morning. The kids have gotten really cooperative leaving the house in the morning. Which is actually a really big deal for these kids who are the slowest moving humans in the world. We got settled in with our bean bags and lunch and the kids played on the playground. Nora fell asleep in the stroller. Jacob was collecting our wine when everything took a turn.

Charlie got stung by a wasp on his foot. We didn’t think too much of it at first really. We took some ice out of the wine bucket and put it on the sting site and all seemed to be fine. At Charlie’s request we packed up and headed for home skipping the splash area. And it was a good job we did. By the time we got everyone packed up and in the car his face had started swelling up. One of his eyes swelled completely shut and by the time we were home he had itchy lips and a slightly swollen tongue. I gave him some Benadryl, had a mild panic attack, researched the best hospital nearby and called Wendy to tell her we’d be late for dinner.

The Benadryl worked it’s magic and the swelling went down and so we headed to our final braai. We had a great last evening with our people. Saying goodbye was terrible as it always is. It will likely be a few years before we are back in SA so it felt particularly hard to leave them this time.

We rounded out our final morning with one last visit to the grocery store park and Doodles restaurant before heading to the airport and starting our trek home.