Luxury Lodgings

Over the weekend, I went to Valley Lodge. Awesome. The Luce is a travel journalist and so gets to visit all sorts of exotic places around the world – all expenses paid of course. This entails a fair amount of traveling on her own, but occasionally she gets to bring a friend along. Luckily for me, the misguided gentleman she’s been gently spading for the last few months is currently out of favour, so I cracked the invite to this luxury lodge.

The first thing we did was explore our new surroundings – and while strolling innocently along we came upon a small herd of impala, a zebra, a wildebeest and a rooi hartebeest. The impala were skittish… and so was I. When the hartebeest started charging up and down the length of the open field, I quickly decided that I was not likely to outrun the animal and so put as much space as possible between me and Haartebeest – while ensuring that The Luce remained somewhere in between (see pic).

Cheeky Hartebeest.

Wild and unruly animals survived (we were also lucky enough to spot the blue-balled underside of a vervet monkey), The Luce and I made our way to the restaurant for one of our many decadent meals. Of course, being a romantic getaway, the lodge was filled with holidaying couples – and me and The Luce. Very sweet.

The Olympic-sized swimming pool was nice too – and with temperatures reaching melting point, even I was enticed underwater for a dip.

Later, The Luce adopted one of the lodge’s pet cats – luring it into our room for the night. Stompie, as we named her (the cat, not The Luce), must be on her 7th or 8th life, as she had lost her entire tail in an unfortunate accident that we could only speculate on.

Stompie was a very elegant cat, besides the lack of balance from her missing appendage, and she liked to show her affection by rooting her claws firmly in our skin and then dragging them back at a leisurely and content pace. She particularly liked sitting on my chest and kneading at my none-existent bosom, which was nicely sunburnt anyway.

We were nervous as to Stompie's unknown house-training status and so felt compelled to 'walk' the cat through the open window routine... "Okay, Stomps," I said as I picked her up from her comfy spot on the bed, "this is how it's gonna work if you need to excrete in any way. You're gonna jump up onto this chair here..." (as I bounced her from the flooor up to the chair) "then you're gonna jump out this window here..." (as the chair bounce was followed by an explanatory close-up of the open window). "Right... Chair, window. Chair, window. No poo-poo in the four-star hotel room, okay?"

Stompie also liked to the play a fun game when the lights were off. This game was called Stalk Koekie. Stompie decided she was, in fact, a bloody panther. And I was apparently her target. She would delight in pouncing on me just as I was falling asleep, digging her claws into my back, shoulders or neck. It was one of the few nights of my life where I felt the need to protect my jugular. I threw Stompie off my bed quite a lot.

See pic of Stompie lovingly caressing The Luce’s arm. See The Luce’s doting and appreciative facial expression.
Good food and good company. A good weekend… Until Sunday evening, when the inevitable happened. All my self-indulgent feeding of Seymour the Beast caught up to my IBS-suffering insides.

If you have seen Meg Ryan in French Kiss, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Think about her on the train, having ploughed through a platter of cheese…

“Uh oh…. Oh, Cramp… CRAMP! Oooooooooh. Oh. Argh…. LACTOSE INTOLERAAAAAAAANCE!”