We will rock you

This weekend was supposed to be exciting – a quick trip up to Pilanesberg and Sun City. These are adjacent to one another about two hours north of Joburg. Pilanesburg is a great little national park that boasts an awful lot of wildlife in a very small space. Sun City is South Africa’s tribute to Vegas, complete with a water park. We actually did make it up to both places and I think the kids had a great time but I came down with some sort of bacterial upper respiratory nasty thing that left me trying to sleep in the back of the van as much as possible.

We came home Saturday night and I immediately retreated to my bed where I’ve scarcely left since (though I’m feeling much better). On the drive up to Pilanesberg, Lucy was quite inconsolable. The only way she’d stop crying is if the whole van was singing. So we sang. And sang. The kids recently got a new CD from Inside Out, a band that covers other songs, but changes the words. One of the songs briefly covers “We Will Rock You” by Queen. They sang that a few times.

On Sunday I was curled up in a ball in my bed when I heard my door shut. Lucy had come in and shut herself in. She walked back and forth from the door to the bathroom to the closet and back. And all the while she was singing “La la la…la la”. It’s hard to get the sound right, but you have to do that little la la bit to the tune of We Will Rock You. She serenaded me for quite a while. Very cute.

So a bit about our outing. On Saturday morning we got everyone in the car by 6 am to go look for game. In the next six hours we saw an amazing array of African wildlife – elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, zebras, impalas (and various other antelope like creatures – cantaloupes, as Porter calls them), white rhinos, ostrich, warthogs, etc. We’ll get some pictures up later. The most stunning thing for most of us was how difficult it was to spot these animals in their habitat. It is unbelievable how difficult it can be to spot an elephant cooling himself under a dead grey tree. By the end the kids were beside themselves, not so much with the grandeur of the animals, but with impatience to get to Sun City (Sin City). So we went.

They were so excited to get in the wave pool. And they had the time of their lives for about 15 minutes. Then they realized how cold the water was. They went back in for a bit, but we hadn’t been there an hour before both boys had huge raspberries across their shoulder blades from falling off the tube in the shallow end. Mason’s been petitioning for a Purple Heart ever since. I don’t think anyone of the kids got away without some sort of raspberry somewhere. Bakalite or whatever it’s called isn’t as forgiving as sand.

Lucy just walked by and gave me her now signature, “La la la la…la la” She’s certainly a Queen.