The last few weeks in Kenya and Tanzania have been wonderful, but not exactly relaxing. Driving is stressful and walking is stressful. We haven’t had a washing machine. We’ve had to stagger showers to make the most of the hot water. And we’ve had to rely on guides for a lot of activities.

Our plan for Cape Town was to stay put for a while in a place that’s “easy” and to do some (literal and figurative) housekeeping and chilling. Today was the first day of doing just this.

We slept in after the long travel day yesterday of no sleep. Even Millie slept until 8:30, which is luxurious compared to her norm. We made breakfast, drank multiple cups of good coffee, and did some laundry. It’s funny how we started this trip feeling annoyed that England didn’t have dryers, and now I’m so grateful to be hang-drying my freshly laundered clothes.

I had to laugh at our family’s very distinct color palette.

We walked to the nearby grocery store and got some more essentials. We stopped in at a pharmacy and bought more preventative malaria medicine for upcoming stops.

We came back to the Airbnb and Millie got very into creating her first book, all about a girl named “Peaches” who travels around the world. She thought of each page entirely on her own and dictated the story to me to write.

She got to 10 pages before we convinced her to leave the apartment. We are expecting cold weather and rain for the next couple of days so we wanted to take advantage and explore the area.

We walked along the seafront boardwalk to a playground. It is beautiful here.

After playing for a while, we walked another 10 minutes to an even better playground.

Millie made friends with a little girl and Nick and I tried to make sense of the demographics of Cape Town. The park was so diverse.

At about 5pm we dragged Millie away and walked 20 more minutes to the Time Out food market. I like food halls when traveling because we can get a variety of various things, and it’s casual enough for Millie to not feel constrained. She had pasta and arancini and Nick and I split some South African specialties, lamb ribs, oxtail stew, some sort of spicy pickled thing.

Millie insisted on ordering all her food by herself. We took an Uber home and FaceTimed some friends.