July 1

Drove from Elna’s to the airport this morning to return our car to Tempest. The guy inspected the car and gave us a good to go, so we headed off to the Gautrain. On our walk through the airport we stopped by several shops to see if there were any sales on World Cup memorabilia. A few had French and Italian apparel on sale, but that was about it. I guess we have to wait until July 12 for the real sales.

Recharged our gold Gautrain card and jumped on the train back to Sandton. Spent several hours at the Sandton City Mall researching and planning an affordable trip to Victoria Falls, as well as getting more data for the iPad. Not quite sure how we go through data so quickly.

Today was our first time taking Gautrain bus back to Elna’s and it went very smoothly once we found the right bus. On the display in the station there are two different colored routes, but they were both named S3 Ravonia. After searching several busses for S3 Ravonia Alex found a Gautrain employee who showed him a lightly penciled in correction showing that our route was really S3 Randburg. We found S3 Randburg at the front of the line and got on- we were the only passengers. The Gautrain bus has the same color scheme as the train with blue seats and golden brown on the outside. It took us 13 minutes to get from the station to the bus stop that is directly in front of the entrance to Elna’s gated community.

It was a great trip! But we realized that Gautrain needs to design some apparel and other items to encourage people to use the bus and train, as well as for others to promote that they have utilized the new public transportation. I was thinking a button or pin that reads ‘ I rode the Gautrain’ like we have the ‘I voted’ stickers in the US.

Upon our return to Elna’s we received an email from Tempest detailing extra charges for dents and scratches in the first car that we returned. Both of us observed that the pre-exit paper, detailing scratches and dents, that was done prior to taking the car was not as marked up as we remembered. Further examination of the papers attached to the email revealed that the date at the top of the page was June 9- we didn’t check our car out until June 10. In addition, the original mileage of the car was inconsistent with other paperwork and Alex signature was not at the bottom of the page. He had to sign agreeing to the scratches and dents before we left on June 10. When we went to return the original car the Tempest employee said that they couldn’t find out paperwork, but not to worry it would be found. Well I think they couldn’t find our papers, so they wrote a new one with the wrong information. Or this is a different car that got put into our stuff. Either way it is messed up and we are going to fight the charges!

We had a lovely dinner at home with Elna and then booked our safari!!! We leave July 11 from Victoria Falls and make our way back to JoBurg stopping at the Okavango Delta and Chobe National Park in Botswana.

Goodnight

Oh I almost forgot. Walking past the outside of the station we saw a sign for passenger drop off and we were sad that they didn’t name it Kiss & Ride like in DC. However inside the terminal in the actual location they had printed out signs that did say Kiss & Ride! Love it.