Day 67: Surfing at Muizenberg and a Return to the Bike Park at Constantia Uitsig
[Still short on photos here because of the data speed here at our house in Cape Town.]
An active Wednesday. We homeschooled this morning, made PBJs for lunch and headed to Muizenberg Beach (pronounced MUE-zenberg) for a surf lesson for Willa.
Muizenberg aka Muzies is a quintessential little beach town with surf shops, coffee bars and fish & chips joints. It felt like 50% of the people in town were in wetsuits. Gary’s Surf School HQ is on Beach Road, facing the Indian Ocean, in the downstairs of the Hang Ten Cafe. Not kidding.
When we arrived at Gary’s I learned I could grab a wetsuit and a board and tag along with Willa’s lesson. Glad I did. Brandon, our instructor was super nice and an effective coach. The waves were perfect for us beginners and there were so many different breaks that I could be in the same general area as Willa and still find waves that I could ride. Willa had a blast. I love watching her out there. She’s obsessed with the water and really brave, diving through the waves and paddling out on her own. She’s so light that she can stay up, even on small waves which is ideal.
After an hour lesson and a coffee at Hang Ten, we returned to the bike park at Constantia Uitsig for Day 3 in our effort to teach Willa and James to ride. Day 1 was at Constantia with push bikes, Day 2 was on the Sea Point promenade with training wheels.
The staff at the bike park have been excellent. Everyone is cool, helpful, genuinely curious as to what brings an American family out to this dirt bike park at 3pm on a Wednesday. Today Blaze (seriously) was behind the desk — a tattooed biker / surfer who couldn’t have been nicer. He told us about his recent holiday to the US — NYC, LA and San Diego. We learned he loved NYC and proposed to his girlfriend on the pier in Brooklyn overlooking Lower Manhattan. He called San Diego is a “first world Cape Town” which is pretty accurate.
We returned to the push bikes for the first 90 min or so. Then Willa and James decided they wanted to try pedals. There was frustration, there was embarrassment (“those babies can ride and I can’t”), there was shouting at mom and dad, there were tears, there were bumps and bruises and dirty, dusty faces… but in the end, both made HUGE progress. James is more of a natural but Willa was amazingly determined to get pedaling on her own. Hopefully we’ll get back out there one more time this weekend.
After biking we walked about 50 feet to Assagi, a delicious new pizza / pasta joint with only outdoor seating, also on the grounds of the Uitsig winery. It was a lovely setting — sunset, mountains and, just on the other side of a fence, the rolling hills of grape vines. Buuut, the kids were exhausted and “hangry” and decided they were going to awrestle in the nearby grass until the food arrived. That would have been ok except Willa learned the hard way that the aforementioned fence was an electric fence. She was mildly shocked (literally) which understandably sent her into a tailspin until her pasta finally arrived. Surfing, biking and an electric shock. Big day for that girl!
