Hitching a Ride..................!

Sorry for the delay in writing this week, but I was away in Paarl for a few days! I was going to be cat-sitting over this Easter weekend, but Catherine and Stuart made the decision not to join the traffic and go away for the weekend but to stay at home and relax! So, although my ministrations were not needed, I drove down on Monday and back this morning...............

And thereby hangs a tale......

After a lovely few days with my daughter, that included rescuing a cute dog, (Google dachshund X beagle and find a black and brown one),feeding some feral cats, having a lovely meal out and some equally tasty meals in accompanied by wine and telly, I set off home this morning after breakfast at about 10. 'Great', I thought, 'I shall be home in time for lunch.'

And I would have been if the car had not broken down!

Turbines and Rhubarb Crumble!

Last Friday we had an Outing! Sadly Alfie couldn't come with us because we firstly went to visit friends on a farm, and they have dogs and horses and sheep and chickens and cats (remember Wally?) and Alfie would have been a little overwhelmed by it all! So we set off early to be with our friends in time for tea! Our route took us past the tiny town of Hopefield and between the two fields of wind turbines.

Completed and working!

Begun in June 2012, we have watched these being built, counting the completed ones  each time we drove past, which wasn't often! The pieces were shipped to Saldanha, being the nearest port to Hopefield, and from there they were taken by road on the back of enormous lorries. We saw several of them when we were heading off with Gemsquash, and very often there was no room to pass them until they pulled off the road for a quick break.

Bats and Wind Turbines.

A few months ago we bought a bat box. We haven't put it up yet though as it is very heavy and must go on top of a 5 metre pole! We have bats in the (no, not the belfry) old farmhouse buildings next to us, and we watch them in the evenings fall out from under the roof and fly off to consume as many mosquitoes and crop eating insects as they can! Apparently they can consume their body weight in insects! (I can do that with chocolate cake, but I'd never fly afterwards!) Bats are also responsible for the pollination of an amazing list of nut and fruit trees, as well as helping to promote the spread of new trees by pooing while they fly and letting the poo drop onto open ground! Unlike birds that poo in trees! I wanted to find a picture of bats to insert in my blog, so I happily Googled 'bat pictures'. Well, I realised that I should have been more specific as I ended up with a screen full of Batman and Robin in various poses (hmmmm!), old pictures of a pop group called 'The Bats', cricket bats, cricketers holding bats, cricketers running with bats, and a few real bats thrown in for good measure. See below!!

Real bats..thanks to 'africam'