Things Fall Apart

No matter how good your intentions, sometimes even the best laid plans fall apart. Earlier this year I wrote about our travel plans for 2017, and I was particularly excited about our trip to Knysna for the Easter weekend. Well, that never happened.

I think I easily spent about four to six hours scouring all my favourite booking sites for a place to stay that can accommodate three adults and an infant, that still had a view of the lagoon, the reason one goes to Knysna in the first place. Eventually I found the perfect apartment. It wasn’t within walking distance of the town centre or docks, but it was located on the hill with a fantastic view over the water. The only hesitation I had was that there was a cancellation fee. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have had a premonition. But I ignored it, and booked anyway.

Next up were plane tickets. And this is where everything came undone. Infants fly for free, thankfully, but for the three adults the total amounted to R12k to fly down from Johannesburg to George. That’s R4k each, which is ridiculous, especially considering that we can fly to Europe for about R6k each. Disgusted, I closed my browser and decided to wait for any specials that might come up closer to the date.

But as the months passed I watched in horror as prices skyrocketed instead of coming down. In the last week before the cancellation fee changed from 50% to 80% the ticket prices stood at R16k in total. No way was I going to pay that for a trip down to the Eastern Cape. Just because it was the Easter weekend didn’t mean I had to subject myself to daylight robbery.

We could drive, of course, which would have been much cheaper even with the cost of petrol. But it’s a 1300 km trip one way, or roughly 13 hours without any stops. That means in a four-day weekend two of those days would be spent driving, and with a toddler in the car that just wasn’t feasible.

Defeated, I had to cancel our plans and our accommodation. Luckily, after explaining the situation to the apartment owners, they waivered the cancellation fee, which I thought was pretty decent of them and was at least a little ray of light in the dark tunnel that has been our holiday plans for 2017 so far.

So what lies ahead for us travel-wise this year? I have no idea. Another bombshell has dropped (more on that later) and the little traveller and I have been ill non-stop for almost three months now with a variety of maladies ranging from the flu to gastro to bronchitis to pneumonia. This might just be the year where we slow down and stay home for a bit, where we reminisce about all the places we’ve been to in the past and all the places we want to go to in the future. Only time will tell…