Its been a busy month of travelling around South Africa attending Provincial Guild meetings with the shop and three weekends on the trot in February heat is not my idea of fun! It does nothing for the creative spirit although I saw wonderful quilts en route.We travelled to Pretoria first- this time taking ten hours to do a normally 5 hour trip. There was heavy rain on the way up to Pretoria and a HUGE accident on the van Reenen's Pass which necessitated a two and a half hour through the picturesque but very slow Olivers Hoek Pass.
Here is a picture of the Sterkspruit Dam which is on the road through the Olivers Hoek pass. Its huge and right in the mountains and when we passed there was mist rising off the water.
IT was only when we hit the outskirts of Johannesburg that we realised just what damage had been done by the rains- and was still being done. We got into a traffic jam and had to find a place to stop for a couple of hours until the traffic cleared and the rain slowed down. It simply wasnt worth the possibility of an accident.It was as though someone had opened the sluice gates in the sky and everything possible was comming down. It was like sitting in a West African thunderstorm- except this wasnt West Africa and it wasnt a thunderstorm!
The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful and on the way back I stopped in Kroonstad for petrol. Opposite the petrol station was the most marvellous stone church with a very unusual roof so "nog" a photograph.
Many of the older buildings in the Free State are built out of the beautiful Free State sand stone which varies from creamy yellow to a variety of browns.This church was probably built at the turn of the century when stone masons were still working in the country.
This piece of sculpture we named " the Lego Man" and we found him at the gate of a farm between Kroonstad and Senekal in the Free State.When we got closer we found that he had been welded together with bits of pipe and old farm implements. Either way he made for welcome relief from a sea of green grass and what seemed to be a never ending road.
