On Thursday I finally made it to Spier Winery, and I actually could not have chosen a better day (or time for that matter) to rock up. You honestly won't believe this....

Spier is about 10k away from the house and I arrived a bit before lunch, as I though I would do the Outreach stuff, have lunch and then wander around the grounds and maybe do a little tasting. As I was walking from the car park toward the Cheetah Outreach entrance, there was about 4 or 5 black americans in front of me and they started singing and I have to say, my heart dropped and I thought "no - some bunch of southern baptist choir types who are going to get on my nerves around this place". Anyway they stopped singing & we all went into the Cheetah Outreach.

This is definitely not as good as the one I went to at Kruger, they don't have very much space and the facilities are awful. Apparently, Spier was recently sold and the new owner isn't interested in the Outreach stuff, so is trying to close it down & get rid of it, so I guess that's why the place looks really poor. The one plus they have on Kruger, is you get to go in the pen and "handle" the cheetahs. In reality, actually all you get to do is stroke one a bit while it's practically passed out in the heat, but it's still not something you get to do everyday.

Before you get in with the cheetah, you have to wait in a holding pen & while I was waiting, the 2 young girl attendents were chattering away like crazy to the American waiting with me & I discovered that it was because Usher - yes, that is Usher the american pop singer - was in the pen I was about to go in. And yes, it had been his group that I had followed from the car park. So, without realising it, I got a quick private concert from Usher - my new claim to fame!!

My cheetah was 9 years old, very tame and rather larger than the ones I saw up at Kruger, but it was still an amazing thing to do, though the fur wasn't as soft as I thought it would be, it was a lot coarser than I expected. Unfortunately you only get about 5 minutes, but it's pretty cool and a handler takes a bunch of photos for you on your camera - so I have some more photos with me in!

Went to the Raptor Outreach after the Cheetahs and I have to say this is much better. I couldn't believe how many birds they had & how many different types, I never saw so many birds of prey so close before and there were a lot of ones native to SA that I had never seen or heard of. What was really nice was that many birds were not caged, so you could get up really close. Also, they had a pen with baby owls in it where you could in & handle the owls, which were really cute. They also had some barn owls and little fluffy owls out that you could stroke, which was wonderful, as I think the Barn Owl is quite the most beautiful bird in the world. (And yes, I took alot of photos and couldn't remember what the birds were!!)

Had lunch in the restaurant, though was seriously tempted by the picnics they sold; you could go into this little deli type shop & buy everything you needed for a picnic and they would pack it all up in a basket for you to take over to the picnic area. As it was incredibly hot, I opted for the restuarant, with a seat in the window and a delicious breeze to cool me down. I actually made the right choice, as after lunch, which was rather large, I decided to go and sit in the picnic area for a bit to let my lunch go down and not only was it hot, it was infested with sand flies!!

Being too full to do any tasting and too hot to wander around any more I decided to go home and take a nap!

Martin was back from his UK travels Thursday evening, so we had steak and Maritha's special cabbage, which is amazing - I am seriously loving her cooking - and probably the latest night we've had this week!

Today was an unintentionally lazy day, got caught up in my book and all of a sudden it was lunchtime!! Not that I had any particular plans, as having been to Spier, I'd pretty much seen what I wanted to. So, this after noon I decided to have a mooch around the mall, which is quite a large mall. Was tempted by a few things, but decided as I would have to carry around the rest of the world, perhaps I didn't want them that much. Went to the cinema on the spur of the moment and watched "This means War" which was fairly corny, but did have some good laugh out loud moments in it, so it wasn't a bad way to waste an hour or so.

Think we are having a braai again this evening, which will be great and hopefully Rod will be coming over at some point this weekend, which will be lovely!