A Day in the Life: World Race Travel Day; Bulawayo, Zimbabwe to Manzini, Swaziland
6:00 – Wake up
6:15 – Tear down tent and pack up
7:30 – Clean up campsite
8:00 – Breakfast
8:30 – Help sick teammates get all of their things together
9:00 – Wait on busses to arrive
10:00 – First bus arrives, but you decide to wait for the second so you can let your sick teammates sleep longer
11:00 – Still waiting on busses, someone starts reading Harry Potter out loud to pass the time
12:00 – Harry Potter is everything, still waiting
13:00 – Finally we load up and leave (get carsick on the bus ride to town)
14:00 – Arrive at next waiting location in town, vomit, attempt to find some food/clean water for the bus rides ahead
15:00 – Back at waiting spot, get all of our stuff together to walk to bus station
15:30 – Walk to bus station, get stared at by every local as we are a crowd of 50 people with 100 bags
15:45 – Arrive at bus station, Load up bus (stand outside since I feel like I could vomit at any moment)
16:00 – On the road again. . . Still on the verge of vomiting
19:30 – Boarder crossing (find out bags were checked wrong, so we have to unload everything, take it all through security, and reload the bus)
23:00 – Just can’t wait to get on the road again. . . (Quick vomit break first)
23:30 – One and only snack/potty stop (plot twist, we just entered South Africa so we don’t have correct currency and there’s no card reader or ATM.)
8:30 – Finally fall asleep only to have my seat buddy wake me up so I could pass her a bag to vomit in
10:00 – Finally arrive in Johannesburg, get a stern talking to by another person on our bus about how the only thing we should be eating when we travel is bananas, then we wouldn’t be sick
10:30 – quick potty break and bus switch
11:30 – One the road yet again. . .
13:00 – Lunch pit stop, first real food in over 24 hours (awesome animal sightings on the game reserve outside. Ostrich, antelope, elephants, hippos, etc.)
13:45 – Back at it
14:45 – Boarder crossing into Swaziland in the rain, luckily they let us right through without any troubles or having to unload any of our belongings
15:45 – Annnd, the final leg of our journey has begun!
18:00 – Arrive at PVT location to drop off half of the squad, condense everyone/everything else down to two vans
18:45 – Grocery store stop
19:30 – Arrive at team house we are using for the week
20:00 – House rules meeting
20:45 – Everyone crashes. . . HARD!
Travel days on the world race are always full of adventure, and glorious mishaps. You learn to embrace them for all they are and realize that Travel will most likely never be this complicated again, so if you can survive 11 months of this, you can survive any other travel day life throws at you.
