In 2016 I started walking for exercise. I started with parkruns, my first being on 24th September 2016. This was not my first attempt at a parkrun. My first attempt ended with me completing only half a parkrun and decided then and there to buy new shoes.  But on 24th September I completed my first full parkrun in just over an hour, and I met one of the two people who would start on the Camino journey with me.

In March 2017, I bought my Cape Camino passport. 

This gave me the maps for the full Cape Camino experience – a walk around the Cape Peninsula.  As you can see from the date of this post, it took a while for me to decide to do anything with it. I thought I would be walking the peninsula with my husband, but due to illness I realised that was not going to happen. At this point I started talking to the friend (F) I met on 24th September about not meeting for parkrun, but instead doing different walks. And then I brought up a walk around the peninsula. The two of us arranged to walk part of day 1 of the Cape Camino. We were used to 5km walks, so didn’t want to walk 18km on day 1, so we broke up day 1 into 3 days. Our first walk was going to be one-way from Groot Constantia to Buitenverwachting. A few days ago, I asked F if I could invite M who she had met once before at parkrun and who was a long-time friend. M was also bored at walking the same parkrun route each week and all three of us needed to find a purpose to our walking. And so our walking group was born.

The day arrived and this morning, after leaving a car at Buitenverwachting, the three of us parked at Pastis, walked to the shrine in Schoenstatt Avenue and then through Groot Constantia.

No pictures at the shrine, but above is our arrival and below is a local resident.

It turned out that some of the directions were a bit vague for us, so we walked more of the vineyards than intended, but we were having a lot more fun than we ever imagined. Wetook a selfie to prove we were actually there, as we couldn’t believe it ourselves.

All too soon we were walking towards Buitenverwachting, meeting a few miniature horses on the way.

We alked past Buitenverwachting and to the Kramat Of Sheikh Abdurahman Matebe Shah.

After spending some time at the Kramat, we walked down the hill to Buitenverwachting. At that point, the “key incident” came to light. F had mentioned at the start of the walk that she had left her keys in my car, and hers was the car left at Buitenverwachting. M and I heard her say this and not one of us realised the implication before we started out – we were expecting to hop into F’s car and drive back to the start… but… we didn’t have the keys so we needed to walk.

The route back to Pastis was shorter as the route there had included some detours, but still, we walked further than we thought we would, and certainly further than we thought we were capable of. Our 5km turned into 8.3km.

We learnt a lot on the inaugural walk of our walking group: (1) we can walk further than we thought, (2) we can walk uphill, (3) walking is actually fun, and (4) we can follow a route even when we don’t fully understand the directions, and last but not least (5) when I realise that an awful mistake (with the keys) has been made, I am apparently quite calm when bringing this to the attention of the group!

I will add that the 3 of us make an awesome group – we clicked from the first moment and seem to all be in the right place at the right time to make this a fantastic adventure.

Thanks to Cape Camino for getting us started on this journey.