A sight for dry eyes.....

.....we had a great day riding with a tail wind coming from Bedford, north to Cradock where we had spent Christmas Eve...loaded with lots of food, including Christmas cookies and chocolate from our favorite grocery store: “Spar”.
We tried some dirt roads a few days prior, but had enough of the “short cuts” and chose the paved Highway 10 on Christmas Day...perfect: Hardly any traffic, sunshine, cooler temperatures (90f instead of 120f), beautiful country AND: tailwind! A true present from nature.
One tends to “judge the day before the evening” on a day like that and predictably the last 10 km were hell in headwind, through a Township that never seems to end. Kids ran up to me, begging and pulling on my bike while the wind pushed me back. James got pushed sideways and fell off his bike - luckily not into the traffic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township_(South_Africa)

..riding inland towards a little town named Hofmeyr. December 22nd 2019
Wind

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/south-african-township-homes-news-photo/635935395

We had to dodge flying plastic bottles, boxes, cardboard ....trash came soaring  towards us, spiced with dirt and sand.  The 10km took forever! But then, past the township over the hill and still into the wind (with less trash flying) we found quite the fancy, closed hotel near downtown and talked the security guard into giving us a room - in spite of being closed for the holidays. We pampered ourselves with a hot shower and white sheets.
But the hellish wind wasn’t done with us the next day. Only 60km to go and we thought we would have an easy day on a paved road to Hofmeyr......
I found myself with my thoughts alone, isolated from the rest of the world.

Just me, the wind and the sun. I started chewing on my tongue because my cuticles (which I usually tare apart when I am nervous) are attached to my fingers which were busy holding on to my handlebars to keep my Gurly pointed forward and in the right direction while the wind was having its way with me. It tugged on my spokes, like it was a harp and I was focusing on the music, while the whole bike was vibrating, it played with my trinkets on my bicycle, and pulled on my hair, my clothes, my thoughts, my sanity. I was trying to breath through my mouth, because it had dried out the inside of my nose and it was difficult to pull in the forced air- it hurt and now my throat dried out and I felt like I got dehydrated just trying to breath. The wind and its daytime companion the sun sucked the moister out of every orifice of my body,  like a raisin, some wrinkled fruit which forgot its origin underneath all those folds.
And then there was Hofmeyr and that is another story....