Acorn House, nope, Cape MIlner Hotel

I found the airport again and luckily I was able to take my car back to the exact place where I picked it up. I was met by another handler from Enchanting travels who transported me and my luggage to Acorn house at the foot of Table Mountain. The house itself was quite lovely but there seemed to be a glitch (another) in my booking which they tried to accommodate me by putting me in the attic room at the top of 4 flights of stairs. My original request was a ground floor room. Which they didn't seem to know about.
Another call to Maryanne and although she tried to sort it out by having them move me, all the other rooms were booked and there was no where for me to move to. I never found out exactly what the disconnect was, except if I had stayed there, they would have had to

move me rooms several times in the 4 days I was there as the original booking was missing.
However, I was to stay one night since Maryanne needed to look for another place for me to stay. The girl at the front desk was very nice and offered to go get me supper as it was about 7 or 8 o'clock when this all got sorted. I was hot and tired after driving for 6 hours down the coast and seriously, why did this keep happening?
I must admit that I just figured that the best thing to happen was to stay put and deal with the numerous room moves so I went to bed thinking that I just needed some sleep and have a fresh outlook on it in the morning. I emailed Maryanne my thoughts and felt that this would be fine.
I woke refreshed and energized, went down for breakfast by the pool which was a great breakfast and quickly checked my emails. Maryanne answered my email with a request to call. She did and was over the moon apologetic and I basically told her that it was ok, I was fine, I would stay and deal with them trying to accommodate me even if that meant multiple moves.
I went off on my first tour which happened to be a private tour as I was the only one to have booked. It was a half day tour of Cape Town so off I went to Table Mountain with a guide named Marcon.

Marcon dropped me off in the line to go into Table Mountain. I had a pre-booked online ticket. Because we were there early, the line up was about 15 minutes before I was through and onto the tram. Marcon accompanied me throughout. We were lucky as today was a crystal clear day and it was going to be another hot one but so far the crowds were behind us. The view from the top was a thing of beauty. So beautiful. We walked all the way around and then Marcon went off to visit his brother who was also a tour guide, poor guy, he had a group of Germans! Noisy bunch. I was left to explore on my own. I discovered that calla lilies grow wild here on the mountain. There is also this little animal whose name I don't remember scurrying about. Pretty cute. I looked it up. Its called a Hyrax. This one was a Rock Hyrax, or a dassie and its not a rodent, its closest living relative is the elephant. This seemingly bizarre fact is definitely not due to any obvious physical similarities but due to a common ancestor. Who knew? There were also people repelling off of table mountain I thought they were a bit crazy myself when there was a perfectly good tram to go down. People do walk up and back down which apparently takes 1-2 hours.

We toured around Cape Town with Marcon pointing out the water

front, the Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, Bokaap where the colourful painted houses were. We stopped for a visit at a diamond museum where I got a demo of how they cut diamonds and got to see Tanzanite which is only mined in Tanzania. Very interesting. We also went up to signal hill where I got to witness the shooting of the big cannon at precisely noon. This is in remembrance of all those who lost their lives in wars and those that survived.
Then back to Acorn House where I wandered to the corner café to get some lunch. It was there that Maryanne called to say that she was moving me from Acorn House to The Cape Milner Hotel. Just when I unpacked

The hotel was a swanky upgrade but definitely not my cup of tea. It was large, contemporary, white and chrome and gray with sharp lines and hard angles. However it did have a couple of things going for it: I got the same room on the ground floor for 3 nights, there was a very large pool, there was a bar and a dining room that was opened all day and Maryanne worked really hard to make all of this happen so I was going to be happy and grateful.