I’ve always been struck by the number of people who’ve left Stone but keep up to date with what’s going on in their former home town through A Little Bit of Stone – so I asked some of them to tell their stories! Here’s the first – Lynne Shepley and husband Frank left Stone in 2012 for South Africa. Thanks to Lynne for the story below…
I and my husband Frank left Stone in January 2012 for a place called Hout Bay. It’s a smallish place on the coast, a 20-minute drive south of Cape Town. We had visited The Cape a few times on holiday and got married out here in 2006. Frank is a plumber and I am a market researcher and we ran our own businesses in Stone, so when we wanted to semi-retire we decided to give it a whirl.
Hout Bay is very like Stone in that it has a real ‘community feel’. But whereas every year you have the Stone Festival, the Food Festival and the Music Festival, Hout Bay hosts The Argus Cycle Tour, The Two Oceans Marathon and The Schools Sandcastle competition. Hout Bay, like Stone, also has lots of nice restaurants and bars and we have now swapped Wetherspoons for ‘Pakololo’s Beach Bar’ and La Piazza for ‘Luigi’s’.
Cape Town and Hout Bay are on The Cape Peninsula and many of the places on the peninsula have English names – we have a Llandudno and a Scarborough for example. Cape Point (The Cape of Good Hope) is at the very southern tip of the peninsula and Cape Town is at the northern end. The peninsula is a National Park and very beautiful and the lifestyle is very much outdoors – cycling, running, hiking and surfing are all very popular.
Summer is December to March, Winter June to September. In the summer its 20 -30c but there is aways a cooling breeze because the Cape Peninsula is located where the Atlantic meets the Indian ocean. Winter typically is intermittently wet and sunny but mild around 10-12 c in the daytime.
We are enjoying life out here very much, but it’s great to be able to keep in touch with Stone via the Little Bit of Stone website. In many ways we know more about what is happening in Stone now than we did when living there!
Have you left Stone and headed overseas?
Email news@alittlebitofstone.com – I’d love to hear from you!
Related Posts:
