Not quite the night I needed after a hard day's gricing

Other gricers will have had much harsher experiences I know. But I aimed to do a hard day’s pre-dawn to sunset gricing every day on my steam trips that almost always included a lot of driving, often on unsurfaced roads. So I aimed to overnight somewhere I could have a roof over my head, be fed and watered, and have a clean bed to sleep in.

This is from my 1990 South African trip where I had left the Kimberley to De Aar line to fit in a busy few days of Cape and two foot gauge steam at Port Elizabeth, the Patensie branch and George to Knysna. The text below is just written in my SA Steam Loco memoirs book for 25 June 1990.

That evening I drove on to the George-Knysna line and stayed overnight, I think at George. I may not remember exactly where the hotel was, but I do remember it was a very cold and damp evening. My memory of the night is helped by the note in my bash book that reads ‘cold & damp. After dinner I took off my shoes, put on an extra pullover and went to bed fully dressed’.

Bryan

 

Reminds me of one night when we were staying in Reshui for a few days on the Jing Peng Pass. Heating was provided by a large boiler in a boiler house in the hotel courtyard. Woke up in the early hours of the morning feeling a tad chilly. Then I noticed the radiators were stone cold and ice had formed on the inside of the windows. A quick check outside revealed the boiler house to be as dead as a dodo and no smoke coming from the chimney. Seems the boiler had gone out and the chap minding the thing was nowhere to be seen. So it was on with the thermals and back to bed.

 

My evenings on the Knysna line were spent staying with a relative, sitting out on their porch, eating oysters and drinking lovely Cape white wines from Paarl.....
It was really tough
No idea if it was cold... I had inner central heating.

Contrast with a volunteer weekend in Tywyn at Mrs Jones's Guest House where, even with three of us, there was ice inside the window and we could see our breath.