This morning Thea came to our house and we all drove up Red Hill to the Brooklands ghost town carpark where we met Lydia, all the way from Kiwiland, and another Stephen - no doubt also the Alpha Male of his family! The Food Lady got the start a bit messed up, but eventually we established that Alice was waiting for us further up the road in the chill wind. Stephen set his fancy GPS and we were off.
We found Alice, Maddie and Claude at the dam - all ready for the hunt.
A bunch of roses in the fynbos? Nah, a teeny tiny doll's house daisy called Petalacte coronate.
Views across the Atlantic.
A plant that I can identify with (a bit) - called Rats Tail or Rostert (Babiana ringens). It grows a stiff "rats tail" that you can see sticking up behind the flowers, which is actually a perch for sunbirds who pollinate them.
Some more pretty miniature flowers - the Broad-leaf Clutia (Clutia alaternoides),
and a pretty Claudie - don't you just love the goatee? I was rather missing Dougal today - wondering if he was somehow out there in the fynbos and trying to find me.
Doogs, we all miss you so much. Where have you gone?
Tea photo - Alice, Maddie 'n Claude, Lydia, Thea, the Alf, me and Stephen. Stylish sandwiches the order of the day.
The restio of the week. (The FL is trying to get to grips with these Cape Reeds as they are apparently hugely important in fynbos.) This is a Thamnochortus of sorts - maybe fruticosus. Impossible things!
Another miniature flower - this one is the rather rare and special Thistle Protea (Protea scolymocephala).
We walked through stands of purple Erica parviflora,
and white Salt-and-pepper Heaths (Erica imbricata),
and saw lots of bulbs that gave us a spring in our step. (This one is possibly Babiana ambigua).
Waiting for the Food Lady, and a chance to check the GPS (we'd walked about 9 kms) and check for ticks,
uh oh, one on the Alf's trousers: a rascally Rhipicephalus.
Back down to the Lewis Gay Dam we went,
some of us without our shoes.
Alice and my two black Bouvier friends disappeared into the daisies for a swim.
The last flower - a single golden Ewwa-trewwa (Satyrium coriifolium).
On the was home the Alf identified this car - turns out it has the same name as my new friend from Tokai Park - Bentley.
We stopped at the tapas bar again for a beer and a selection of tapas snacks - and this time the FL slipped me a taste of octopus on a corner of Spanish bread. The Food Lady really liked the "Starry Eggs" tapas - "Huevos estrellados con jamon".
The floor does colour co-ordinate well with me. Tres chic.
Not too sure about this croc though.
I'd keep an eye on that croc if I were you!
ReplyDeleteand don't they have the loveliest collars and leads
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