March 2011

Wednesday, 30 March 2011 Quite a day of lots of different things, Rob helped us today and at first it was a bit of adjustment for him to fit into the well oiled team. Ellie and I are of course so used to working together that we don’t need to say what needs to be […]

Friday, 26 March 2011 No blogs from the previous two trips, the first one by Ellie and I to make a path from Gibson’s Gulch to the river crossing, not quite your average garden job but we managed and then another one by Neil to wield his chainsaw to cut the offending pine tree down.

Sunday, 19 March 2011 Last time when we opened the valve we noticed water oozing out of the soil on the road which of course indicated a further leak so we needed to move the main connection to the other side of the road. I had dug a trench there already the previous outing and

Wednesday, 03 March 2011 The mission today was to get the pipe to the manhole at the quarry. We got stuck last time at the pine tree and no matter what we tried we could not get the 32mm pipe through. We still wanted to have something to show for our effort and left the

Saturday, 5 March 2011 Today a big push, pardon the pun, to get the pipe through to the end of the servitude and to get it connected to the old asbestos pipe by the track. Neil had organized all the connections, unfortunately he had made the connection for a 32mm pipe and we had used

Sunday, 27 February 2011 Chip off the old block, so when our son, Nick, was visiting us from Cape Town he wanted to see what we were busy with and he duly got roped in. We had decided that the old asbestos pipe was broken and leaking in too many places to be reliable so

Wednesday, 23 February 2011 Our attention is now shifting to tracing the old asbestos pipe on Mr, Gibson’s property to see if it is at all useable. Our marker is the pine tree at the end of what seems to be an old track and what could be a servitude for the pipe. To the

Monday, 21 February 2011 We were determined to solve the mystery of the blockage so when we told Neil that we were going out on Monday he suddenly developed a strange illness for which the only cure was a day spent in the open air digging for pipes and he joined us. The only possibility

Sunday, 20 February 2011 The previous Wednesday we had gone out to assist with the tracking down of the main connection of “our” water pipe to the main supply which runs along the Ladyslipper dirt road. The people of the municipality with Deon in charge, had located this a few weeks beforehand and now was

Sunday, February 6, 2011 Today we had a Friends of Van Stadens meeting. We worked in the nursery and afterwards a select group went out to see if we could find the old waterpipe which used to supply Van Stadens with untreated water from the lower Van Stadens dam. This pipe has not been used