Voortrekker Monument and the Pretoria Fan Fest ... NOT

We began our second full day in South Africa by sleeping in and, hopefully, completing our recovery from jet lag.  In the afternoon we visited the Voortrekker Monument, a rather ugly structure atop a hill overlooking Pretoria.

Our first day in South Africa: The kickoff concert!

Our trip to South Africa was uneventful.  Eight hours to Amsterdam, a painless transfer at Schipol (no need even to go through customs, as we have often had to do on international travel recently even just switching planes).  The plane from Amsterdam was full of orange shirts, but there was a smattering of fans from other countries.  I had a nice chat with a young Honduran fan who had already been going 24 hours from San Pedro Sula.  Our friend Craig met us at the airport and guided us to his home in Pretoria.

On Thursday morning, we headed down to the Brooklyn Mall to take care of the mundane details - get our tickets, pick up a local cell, and get some local cash.   Craig and his wife Susan had snagged tickets to the kickoff celebration at the Orlando stadium in Johannesburg,

So Joe and Nancy and I went along with them and their children Shona and Theo (shown pictured with Joe)

Charming airline reservations

For our internal flights between Cape Town and Johannesberg, we have been reserving on Mango Airlines.  They have a mandatory "green fee" (not much, so hard to complain), and then there is the option of taking your bike on the plane for an extra $25.

The web site operates bizarrely. Unlike American airlines, where the low prices are available early on, then steadily go up, lower fares appear pretty much at random, so if you don't like the fare you see one day, hold on and try the next and it may well go down.  In the end, we can fly 4 people roundtrip between Johannesberg and Cape Town for $520 or $605 depending whether we are following the Group C winner or the Group C runner-up. Not bad for such a long flight (800 miles).

Our route to the World Cup in South Africa

I was introduced to soccer in the late 60's at Reed College in Portland.  I grew up a political activist, otherwise very much a nerd.  But our school had a bunch of prep school graduates plus one ringer every year, our British exchange student, so we actually had a reasonably strong soccer team.  Some of my friends played on the team, so I did too.  We regularly beat University of Portland, for example; this was before the days of Clive Charles and their strong soccer program.   Its program, and Portland State's, revolved around their students from the Middle East.   I played a bit of intramural soccer during law school at the University of Chicago, and a bit of pickup soccer with Antioch Law students when I first got to DC.  Then I totally forgot about the sport until my older son started playing Stoddert; as a supposedly experienced adult, I started coaching.  Slowly but surely I got hooked again, playing pickup and watching our two children playing recreational and travel soccer.

South Africa retrospective

Back in 2010, before I created this blog, the Washington Post had the nice idea of increasing its coverage of the World Cup in South Africa by inviting readers who were going to be in attendance to post text and photographs about their experiences at the games and in the country in between the games.  Over my time in South Africa, I posted roughly twenty pieces, some short and some long, accompanied by photographs.  I was one of about a dozen readers who responded; the experience gave me a taste for blogging about my travels and led directly to the creation of this blog, hoping that others can learn from my experiences in planning their own travels.

Recently, one of my colleagues as work planned a trip to South Africa, and I wanted to pointed him to my Washington Post blog to get my recommendations, as I have pointed others to my blogging about Norway, Argentina, Utah, Brazil, Tanzania, and other places for a summary of my experiences and recommendations.  But I noticed that only a small group of the blog posts were easily found, and that the photographs were no longer posted. 

Over the next few weeks, I'll be restoring my 2010 World Cup blog posts online by posting them here, along with the relevant photographs.  I hope others will find them useful.

A Short Visit to Cincinnati

The end of our Midwestern swing this month took us to the city of Cincinnati for a wedding celebration held in Mt. Airy Forest Park.  I have spent a fair amount of time in Cincinnati over the years — when I clerked for Wade McCree on the Sixth Circuit my co-clerk and I divided up three-week argument terms, so I had a couple of ten-day stints there in late 1976.  Since then I have been back for a number of court appearances over the years; Sam and I were there for a soccer tournament perhaps ten years ago.  But this was the first time I had got any real appreciation for Cincinnati at large, and I was favorably impressed by the downtown areas, at least – we were all, in fact, favorably impressed.

A Few Days in Northern Michigan

We drove out to Indianapolis for a family wedding on a July weekend, and had another wedding the following weekend in Cincinnati.  In between, we decided that we would head up to Traverse City, Michigan, where the Nancy’s sister has a house, as well as visiting friends from DC who spend their summers an hour further north in Boyne City along Lake Charlevoix.  It was a relaxing few days.

The drive up took about eight hours; we passed through Kalamazoo at about noon on Sunday and decided to stop for lunch.  Based on guidebook information, our first choice for a meal was Food Dance, but only breakfast is served in Sunday and besides it was going to be a 45 minute wait – plainly this is the place to be on Kalamazoo for Sunday brunch.  So we wandered down the street and ate at one of the outside tables at Olde Peninsula, which advertises itself as Kalamazoo’s first brew pub.  Nancy had a reuben sandwich (it was OK); I liked the salmon cooked with a Beer-B-Que glaze.  To drink I had their own Midnight Stout, which was a great beer.  I liked the beer so much that we picked up a couple of growlers (the double IPA and the Sunset Red) as house gifts for the hosts with whom we would be staying during the week.

We drove northward on US 131 and reached Boyne City in the late afternoon.  Our friends live in an improved old logger’s cabin which, they told us, like several other houses near them, had been dragged across the frozen-over lake in the winter.

Lake Charlevoix was directly across the road, and the weather was plenty warm enough to dip into the water for a swim – cold but not nearly so cold as Stone Pond where we will be swimming in New Hampshire in a couple of weeks!  Our friends grilled some lamb ribs and locally–made sausages for dinner; then we enjoyed watching the sun set over the far end of the lake which was very nice despite the clouds