Expat travel with a teenager

My last major trip was to the UK in April where my 15 yo son and I travelled by train, coach, bus, car and foot between Leeds and Bath while he was on his easter holidays. We stayed with family, friends and in hotels. Since then I’ve had a trip to Kruger which was a working holiday and this week the teenager and I are heading off to Cape Town Friday till Wednesday.

We are travelling by train and leave Johannesburg central station at 12.30pm arriving in Cape Town at 3.30pm the following day. We have booked accommodation a 5 minute walk from the waterfront and are flying back home Wednesday night with avios collected with British Airways.

The whole trip has cost less than R5000/£278. While we are in Cape Town we will be travelling on the Big Red Bus, taking a trip up Table Mountain, visiting the aquarium, whale watching and a helicopter ride over the bay. We’ve yet to book these excursions and have approached companies to see if they’d be interested in a sponsored blog post or two with numerous tweets, face book updates and instagrams thrown in at random.

Hubby will be dropping us at the station Friday an hour before the train leaves, due to the barriers closing prior to departure, we have a bag of snacks and food packed for the journey as this is South Africa and one ever knows what will happen, don’t want to be stuck with no food or drink for over 24 hours. I wonder if they'll let us braai on the train. We are also taking bedding with us, although it is provided at R55 pppn, there have been disputes recently, if bedding is available hubby will take it home, which will make our flight back a lot easier without sleeping bags and pillows.

Both the teenager and I are very excited about our upcoming trip, especially as public transport isn't available in Gauteng apart from the Gautrain which is quite expensive. Watch out for photos, tweets and blog posts. I'm not sure we'll have a lot of internet access, especially on the train, but we do have free wi fi in our apartment.