After breakfast we went on a road trip. A few weeks ago we were visiting with a couple who we’d just golfed with and they raved about the west coast north of Cape Town. They urged us to take a drive and they even recommended a couple of restaurants that they thought we should stop at. One was “The Noisy Oyster Restaurant” in the small town of Yzerfontein, and the other was “The Beach Restaurant” up in Paternoster a little farther up the coast. Today was the day for that.

I guess we should have done a bit more research before heading out. We were expecting to drive along the coast — to see beaches and rugged coastline and ocean waves, etc. Instead we were a few miles inland and only saw the water a couple of times. What we DID see was a lot of road construction. That meant ‘stop-and-gos’ — where we waited in for minutes at a time in one lane while the oncoming traffic was let through, and then we could continue. Still, we were near Yzerfontein, which was supposed to be our lunch stop, but it was only 10:30. Okay, we’ll just continue and make Paternoster our lunch stop.

We got there at around 12:30. Just about the perfect time for lunch! Paternoster is a small beach town. The restaurant we were looking for was called The Beach Restaurant. We can find this without the GPS — we’ll just drive along the beach…

Cute little town — it reminded us of Greece, Santorini in particular. All the cottages were white with blue trim and blue roofs. Yeah, but no “Beach Restaurant”. Okay, I’m hungry. I’ll just pull over and type ‘restaurants’ into Google Maps and SURELY it will be just down the beach from where we are. But when I typed in ‘restaurants’ the first one on the list was “The Noisy Oyster Restaurant” — hmm… I thought that was supposed to be in Yzerfontein. So we had our towns mixed up! We followed Google’s directions to the Noisy Oyster restaurant. What?? Closed? Open hours are WEDNESDAY to Saturday, 12-3. But today was Tuesday. We drove 150 kms of road construction for this?

I drove past the closed restaurant and continued up the hill. Spectacular views! And a few more restaurants, most of which were open. We parked behind the “Blikkie Pizzeria” and got a table out front, with a view of the miles of white-sand beach along the coast. Very nice. And the wood smoke from the pizza oven helped us to decide what to order — a bacon and banana wood-fired pizza.

After lunch we chose a different route back to Cape Town. We were hoping to avoid construction. I guess the government’s road improvement program was going strong — lots of construction on the ‘longer’ way home only made it EVEN longer. But the scenery was different — it reminded us of fall in Alberta — miles and miles of harvested grain fields, and even a few vineyards once we got a little further inland.

When we got home I went uptown to get some supplies — my cell phone had run out of airtime and I needed to top it up.

Sue and I had G&Ts on the balcony. Just before sundown we went out for a walk along the sidewalk on Main Road — heading for Sea Point. We were going to try a Greek restaurant called Ari’s Souvlaki; Marina’s friend Lukas had highly recommended it. The walk was about 5kms. When we got there we were a little surprised to find such a small, old, simple restaurant. We got a table. Sue ordered Moussaka, I the Shwarma with beef from the spit. The food was better than the ambience but neither of us was very hungry and left at least as much as we’d eaten.

We took the bus back to Portswood and made a pitstop there to pick up some fruit and another tub of ice cream.

Back at the apartment we watched some news and ate our ice cream. In bed by eleven — we’ve got an early golf appointment tomorrow.