The rest of the 3rd day’s travel back home was less comfortable and very tiring. The road quickly deteriorated from then onwards. Those of you who know, will agree that one of the worst kinds of roads to travel on (especially with a trailer) is a paved (tar) road that got “holy”! Just as we would pick up speed, there would suddenly be pot holes, some huge, and usually clustered together, that we could only negotiated at crawling speed. Unfortunately, no matter how careful we drove, we often hid that first pot hole with a bang, before we would be able to slow down enough (near standstill) to get through the rest of the “obstacle course”. [cid:image001.jpg@01CD2188.E0649750] A road that we calculated to take us 2 hours, took 4 and as the sun set and it started to rain –bathing everything in a beautiful silvery light – visibility became limited, the kids tired and hungry after more than 12 hours on the road and the road – worse… It was then that I (Nadia, who was driving our vehicle at that stage with Francois in the vehicle with the trailer) started to feel a odd wobble every time we went through a pot hole… It felt like the wheel was loose! I prayed as Ida and I sang praise songs to keep the kids from thinking of being hungry, with my nose to the wind shield, wipers all the time whooshing, trying to see the next pot hole before it “got” us! [cid:image002.jpg@01CD2188.E0649750] It got so bad, that I could not hide the fact anymore that something was seriously wrong. With every pot hole it got worse and so we crawled along at near walking pace, hoping that the guys will quickly caught up with us. Franco prayed for “wings for the trailer” and our protection… Finally the guys caught up and Francois took over the driving of our vehicle. We crawled along until we arrived at our overnight stop.
Looking in under the vehicle Francois saw the most astounding thing: the steering knuckle arm attached to the left front wheel was hanging on with only one bolt left (of 4) and that one very loose at that! (Francois could unscrew it without any effort by hand). With some spare bolts at hand, Francois tried to fixed the problem the next morning. We continued with our trip.