Cape Town Holiday - Days 1 and 2: Lots of Travel
The best vacation ever started at 11am on Wednesday, January 24th. I went into the office for about 4 hours to tie up a bunch of loose ends then headed to the Drygas' to pick up Christina and Maggie (my mother-in-law). We packed up the mini-van and headed to Bala to pick up Joe (my father-in-law) at work. A quick 2-hour drive to JFK later and we checked in and hung out in the international terminal.
We boarded the plane at 5:00pm for a 5:20pm take-off. South African Air is surprisingly very nice. Definitely more legroom than any other international carrier I've been on, including British Air. SAA also has on-demand for every passenger. Each seat has a 12-inch screen in the back of the headrest and offers a wide selection of movies and television shows. Christina and I decided to watch The Departed first. Wonderful flick. DiCaprio is actually believable as a tough-guy, although I thought Marky-Mark's limited role was wonderful. We then watched The Illusionist, which was more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be.
We landed in Dakar, Senegal 6.5 hours into the trip. South African Air uses two types of planes from NY to Johannesburg - the 747 and 383. Because we took a mid-week trip, the smaller 383 was used so we needed to stop in Dakar for refueling. We were in the air an hour or so later. I slept for about 4 hours out of this 8 hour leg of the trip, ate, watched Little Miss Sunshine, ate again, and landed in Johannesburg around 4:30pm local time.
We had seats for the 9pm flight to Cape Town, but thought we'd just go on stand by on an earlier flight considering there was around 4 flights/hour to Cape Town. Unfortunately, we didn't calculate for the increase in demand for seats created by the big South Africa vs. Pakistan Cricket match. So, no seats were available on any earlier flight. Bummer. We sat around for four hours in a very unimpressive airport. We boarded around 9pm and, after a quick 2-hour flight, landed in Cape Town at 11pm.
We picked up the rental car and drove to our very difficult to find hotel - The Fountains. The Fountains hotel is almost brand new - it opened in May, 2006. It's located in the center of Cape Town, a perfect location for a tourist considering its proximity to the major highways and ever-popular V&A Waterfront.
The hotel was found after much turning around. We checked in around 12:30am and fell asleep around 1am - nearly 33 hours after we left Havertown.
We boarded the plane at 5:00pm for a 5:20pm take-off. South African Air is surprisingly very nice. Definitely more legroom than any other international carrier I've been on, including British Air. SAA also has on-demand for every passenger. Each seat has a 12-inch screen in the back of the headrest and offers a wide selection of movies and television shows. Christina and I decided to watch The Departed first. Wonderful flick. DiCaprio is actually believable as a tough-guy, although I thought Marky-Mark's limited role was wonderful. We then watched The Illusionist, which was more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be.
We landed in Dakar, Senegal 6.5 hours into the trip. South African Air uses two types of planes from NY to Johannesburg - the 747 and 383. Because we took a mid-week trip, the smaller 383 was used so we needed to stop in Dakar for refueling. We were in the air an hour or so later. I slept for about 4 hours out of this 8 hour leg of the trip, ate, watched Little Miss Sunshine, ate again, and landed in Johannesburg around 4:30pm local time.
We had seats for the 9pm flight to Cape Town, but thought we'd just go on stand by on an earlier flight considering there was around 4 flights/hour to Cape Town. Unfortunately, we didn't calculate for the increase in demand for seats created by the big South Africa vs. Pakistan Cricket match. So, no seats were available on any earlier flight. Bummer. We sat around for four hours in a very unimpressive airport. We boarded around 9pm and, after a quick 2-hour flight, landed in Cape Town at 11pm.
We picked up the rental car and drove to our very difficult to find hotel - The Fountains. The Fountains hotel is almost brand new - it opened in May, 2006. It's located in the center of Cape Town, a perfect location for a tourist considering its proximity to the major highways and ever-popular V&A Waterfront.
The hotel was found after much turning around. We checked in around 12:30am and fell asleep around 1am - nearly 33 hours after we left Havertown.
posted by JP at 1:35 PM
1 Comments:
I can imagine you must be pretty exhausted after your New York to Cape Town flight (longest non-stop in the world...I don't think refuelling counts as a stop). We flew Las Vegas to Cape Town via Dubai and were beat after that.
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