(I wrote this last night, do excuse me, never had time to do the pictures, I was going to Hemisphere, more on that later)

So as you all know, I drove the sixty odd rand to Franschhoek on the weekend to attend a soiree vibe and drink lots of wine. None of this happened and so in the interests of making this interesting (See what I did there? Me neither) I decided to pop down to the bottle store and get a bottle of wine. I settled on the Nederburg Baronne, not trying to be too fancy, just trying to get mildly to moderately in the mood to write something of substance.

So the vibe is right now, Woolworths cooked the chicken tonight, and all I have to do is cook the organic sweet potatoes. Contrary to popular belief I don’t lead a totally excessive lifestyle in that manner. I had a classical chicken salad for lunch, and dinner is sweet potatoes and chicken. The only let down on the health side are the various drinks that my body consumes, but I think you can forgive me for that. At least I don’t eat McDonalds chubby cheeks.

So that previous paragraph is for those who delight in finding the inner details of this wild lifestyle I lead.

The VR3 was filled with fuel on Saturday morning, and oddly enough I was in decent shape for a Saturday morning. I didn’t bend it too hard the previous night. I decided I would do a two phase trip to Franschhoek, firstly by driving to Casa del Jerry in Stellenbosch, where we would then change chariots and get into the Black Viper (Write up to come soon, but it’s the successor to THE BOMBER!)

I arrived at Casa del Jerry to find someone on the couch, not hungover, but still drunk. Apparently Fiction in town was the cause of the mornings pain. And shame.

Jerry D was in fine shape that morning and he looked fresh, but he doesn’t drink wine so I was let down there.

We strapped ourselves in and programmed the GPS to direct us to the French Corner. For a bit of fun, we had the chick on the GPS talk in Dutch. Like not South African dutchman, but egter Nederlandse taal.

Ja de koperslager! I do know little bits of Dutch, holding a Dutch passport myself, thank you very much!

We definitively proved that Al Gore is a liar on the trip up to French Corner. And as all our readers know, liars go to hell. Check this picture out of this so called “global warming” phenomenon.

To me that looks like snow. The air was cold outside like it was snowing. Unless it was proper Columbian blow on that mountain top, it was definitely snow!

Our first sign that the day was going pear shaped was the traffic. On a Saturday afternoon. Going into Franschhoek.

I was mildly annoyed that this was happening, and told GPS bitch to find a new route. She couldn’t. All she could do was give us an alternate route that would have found us going through the south of Thailand, before catching a boat back to Cape Town, mooring off of Clifton 4th beach, swimming to shore and taking the helicopter back to Franschhoek. Personally, I didn’t have the energy for that.

Eventually we get into Franschhoek and realise that it’s proper festival. In that everyone and their dog was there. The first school boy error was that I never checked the festival schedule. I assumed that due to the good name I cultivated in Cape Town, someone there would know me, and obviously let me drink for free and possibly give me a hand around behind the tent while I eat some ham or something.

The crowds, with Diamond’s Liquor Store in the background. NICE!

Unfortunately for this good sir, I was not in such luck. We arrived at the tent and I was standing behind a smoking belter, so I pitched a tent of my own. Well a marquee anyway.

Thinking that it was all free, and that a slip of my business card would have people falling at my feet, I thought the situation would be easy.

We found out that entrance into the tent was R100, and there were 4 of us. That’s R400. Obviously. Now one of the team didn’t drink wine, another was hanging like the Mona Lisa which left myself and Nedine as the only ones wanting to get absolutely shattered in the sun. Which would have made it boring for the other two.

So we decided to take a meander along the streets and find a quaint little restaurant where I could shuck oysters and swirl wine in this delicate mouth of mine. Once again it was a proper festival and EVERYONE was in Franschhoek, and so all the restaurants were full.

To me it was like holding a t-bone steak (Not in any way related to Tommy “T-bone” Lee or Kid “Minute steak” Rock) in front of a rottweiller, but not actually giving the steak to the dog.

I was surrounded by, at a conservative guesstimate, MILLIONS of litres of wine. We were in wine country. We were at the melting pot of millions of litres of liquidy goodness, and yet I could not get hold of a drink. All I could get without going to a restaurant or the wine tent, was beer and things like “Skelter”, some citrus-drink-vibe-effort-thing.

Not one drop of wine passed my lips the entire day. I was bleak about this but came to realise I never liked the French much anyway, what with their constant jabbering of “Let’s put another shrimp on the bar-beeeee!” and “Gooday mate!”

It irritates me. So I decided to be the manly, steak eating, beer drinking man that I am (Or am not. Can you say amn’t? No? Why not?)

So I headed to the Biltong Bar, which oddly enough had the French colours on it. It’s like the Voortrekkers invading the French winelands on their trekkers (Tractors the the layperson)

But actually one of the main reasons why I didn’t go to the restaurants, or into the tent, is because anything with a calorific value had been consumed. Wine, food, everything, by someone called “Landfill” Check, check, check him out:

Enjoy the kids reaction to Landfill, on the right. Spectacular!

Absolutely stunning. And so we end off one of my more mediocre pieces, as I end off this bottle of wine, and this bottle of wine ends off me.

Prost! (As the French like to say)

Sean Lloyd

Editor