Time has come for us to say bye-bye to Cape Town. Finally! Our time in Cape Town has been nice, despite of the real South African wintery weather, but we spent most of it on the final preparations for our 4WD-trip through southern Africa. And it's good that the time has now come to leave Cape Town behind us and explore Africa.

The past few days we have started teaching Lasse and Sil. They both have to finish the final lessons of this school year, which helps us getting the hang of being teachers. This is not an easy job, and we will need some practiceat it! We formally opened the school year and welcomed our students into our traveling school with just one class: the combination class 3/5 (that will later turn into the combination class 4/6). We invented names for ourselves as teachers and set up a ritual to make clear when school is open or closed. Claudia wears a big ruby ring, Peter a scarf around his head (to suck up the sweat from keeping order in the class), and a picture of our queen Beatrix is put on the classroom table (just like in the old days, when each classroom had a portrait of our queen dangling on the wall straight above the board). Our sons nicely played along and during lunch told us stories about their teachers. It is clear that teaching our sons will indeed provide structure to our everyday life during our trip.

Equipping the 4WD is nearing its completion. The roof rack has been mounted and the second spare tire, 2 jerry-cans for petrol and a gas bottle are fitted on top of it. We have bought 2 zip-up bags, one that holds 2 plastic containers (so-called ‘ammo boxes') for our camping gear; these will be strapped on the roof rack. We bought 2 tents, a fold-up picknick table, pans, cutlery, dishes, cups, glasses, jerry-cans, camping chairs and a second-hand camping freezer (bloody expensive gear). We also got some tools to be able to carry out small repairs ourselves, as well as spare bulbs and fuses, some essential car-fluids (engine, gearbox, power steering, brake, cooling) and a high-rise jack (1,5 m high), so we can put the 4WD on its wheels again after tipping over (we could also use it to exchange a tire off course).

Finally, we have bought ourselves some detailed maps and are exploring the precise route. Where are the nicest places to camp, how long do we stay here and there, how many km's can we travel a day, is the road tarred and how many km's do we travel over dirt-roads, etc. Getting the basics around our decided points of interest right, so to speak.

All in all, we are slowly getting out of the hectic day-to-day mode into a more holiday-like mode. Finally we have to arrive at the ‘we-really-don't-have-to-work-for-a-year mode', but that'll still take some time. We have to first put some km's behind us before we reach that state of mind. Let's just start doing that!