Travel Travails

Travelling for work is no fun at all. Especially with the Polar Vortex on the move across much of America. But sometimes just sometimes these travails takes you beyond the crowded airports, obnoxious co-passengers and taxi-cab woes. On my way to San Francisco from Dallas I got a chance to spend time with my boss who is usually a taciturn and mostly unavailable man. But then delayed flights, APPs exchanged, Starbucks and the ice was broken and me being me had to ask where was his accent from- didn't sound English or South African. And thus began a wonderful, exciting narrative going back to 1800s. So his aunt- his great-grandfather's younger sister was Mary Gaunt. She was the first "white" woman who travelled accross Africa and China. No mean feat in the days of Victorian Australia when women were meant to be kept barefoot and pregnant- of course it still happens in many parts of the world but I'm digressing. She was a published author and a woman of conviction. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gaunt-mary-eliza-bakewell-6290 So now i have found my next read- "Alone in Africa" by Mary Gaunt. Not to be outdone by her grand Aunt, her neice who was a social butterfly met and married her husband solely on the strength of letters sent from Italy to North Africa where he was fighting Mussolini's war. In those Skypeless days she married her husband in-absentia in a little church in Italy and set sail for North Africa on an adventure which took her from the shores of Egypt to Ethiopia, Rhodesia before finnaly setting roots in South Africa! Women of substance and extra ordinary sense of adventure who did not have the comfort of airport lounges, heated cabs or Business class cabins and here I was bitching and moaning about a little dusting on my plane!