Oh for a decent camera!

My son and I took a road trip on impulse yesterday. 6 1/4 hours and 260km later we were back home, having seen and photographed some incredible things! Thankfully the occasionally-dodgy car performed like a dream - it was made for the long road and if I keep it at a constant 110km/hr I can get up to 750km out of a tank! It even did really well up some steep mountains.

For those that know the Cape, we travelled from our home in Somerset West, up and over Du Toit's Kloof Pass (820m at the top), down again toward Worcester, then took an impulsive turn toward Rawsonville. Through that one-horse town, another impulsive turn took us to the shores of an unknown dam, near Brandberg prison, where we wandered and picked up quartz crystals and ate lunch. Back to the main road we turned toward Villiersdorp, then took the road past Theewaterskloof Dam, over the Franschoek pass (stopping at a mountain stream for water and a rest) and back via Hell's Hoogte through Stellenbosch and home. All in all, we did 2 mountain passes, a good few different main routes, had oppressive heat on one side of the mountains and a bit of misty rain on the other, and took a whole lot of pictures.

For those that don't know the Cape, here's the route we took:



Some of the amazing things we saw were huge, towering cliffs on the mountain passes, incredible waterfalls, a single bright-rainbow cloud in the middle of nowhere, the deserted dam with mountains looming far away, and a secret stream. Back home, we uploaded our photos, only to find our camera is seriously on the blink - every single photo has digital lines of junk across it!

Maybe it's one of Murphy's lesser known laws of camera co-operation - the last roadtrip we took, the film in my camera didn't wind on properly and after happily snapping away all day, we discovered we had nothing.

I was really hoping to email the rainbow cloud pics to our local weather service for their interest, or a please-explain, but all we have is this:



It's time we got us a new camera!!!