Old home, new home

In my previous post blogger friend,  Eileen (from Viewing Nature with Eileen) said she gets confused about which is our home, the one in the Free State or the one in the mountains, where we have horses!

Apologies dearest Eileen; I'll try to clarify.

Until October last year, we had our own home in Marquard (Free State). Although we'd lived in that town for 22 years, 15 of those Grant and I only used our South African house as a base when we came out on leave from his work in Africa. 

Grant's health began to fail from mid-2016 and our older son, John convinced him to pack up and store our furniture and effects; sell our house and move onto his land in the Drakensberg, Kwa-Zulu Natal. He, Debbie and our six grandchildren were living in Mozambique at the time. They've since moved to the Western Cape where he's undergoing tanker conversion training. Ultimately they'll all move to the East Coast of South Africa. 

On 17 October, 2016, we loaded our four cats and two dogs into the bin of our pick-up truck, packed our summer clothes and drove down here . The rest of our household is stored in a friend's large closed-in veranda in Marquard.  

The red arrow depicts our trips from Marquard to the Drakensberg and vice versa. The blue arrow shows the 3000km round trip we made on the Harley Davidson last month visiting John and family in the Western Cape

We are only 313km from Marquard. We always travel inland over the mountain pass between Kwa-Zulu Natal and the Free State; and through the beautiful Golden Gate National Park. I always post photos of the trip on Face Book which is what blogger friend, Sandra referred to in her comment on my previous post. 

Now Grant needed to collect several large tools of his trade which are stored with garden implements and furniture in the friend's garage;  and I wanted to look for our winter boots, jerseys and coats as well as jeans, gloves and socks! 

While rummaging through the boxes,  (an awful job, to say the least) I was amazed that, although I came across several storage containers and other kitchen paraphernalia, I realized that having managed without them for the past seven months, I didn't need them at all! We have de-cluttered our lives in a big way! 

Apart from our winter clothing I also packed about a dozen blankets and bedspreads. The newer ones will come in handy on our bed in the rondawel. This will be our first winter in 20 years where we don't have an electric blanket. Grant, with our erstwhile gardeners, John and Jacob helping him,  came across Skabenga's large tire bed. They loaded it and I have a selection of older blankets which will come in handy in future for the dogs. I also found a couple of thick grey blankets which we hope to turn into blankets for the horses, come the really cold months of late June and July. 

So although we loved living in the Free State for more than two decades, we have settled in so well in the Drakensberg, that yesterday when we saw the mountains ahead, we both sighed and said: 

We're home!