We were up at 4am ahead of our trip to Thomas River Historical Village for the day. We were excited. We had not been to the Thomas River Historical Village before.

Now we had a chance or extra reason to visit the Thomas River Historical Village since we would be selling at a market there. We’d heard from several other market sellers that the annual market at Thomas River Historical Village was not one to miss.

We left home in East London at about 5am on Sunday morning 30 November 2014 and it was already light. We enjoyed the drive up the Macleantown Road towards Stutterheim, almost forced to do so due to my fear of increasing speed enough to overtake a truck in front of us.

It is only on very rare occasions that I’ll drive over 100km an hour, and I’m most comfortable driving at about 90km an hour. We settled in at a safe distance behind the truck from when we first caught up to it about half way between our turn off from the main Bonza Bay Road onto the Macleantown Road and Stutterheim. It was only shortly before getting to Stutterheim that a double lane appeared where we could easily overtake it.

Not feeling safe to overtake the truck kept my driving speed at about 80 to 90km, and it gave us a better opportunity to enjoy looking at the countryside as we drove along, but it was still good to speed up a bit shortly ahead of getting to Stutterheim when we were able to pass the truck safely.

We weren’t that far out of the other side of Stutterheim when I just had to stop for ten minutes and take some photos. There was some mist on the hills in the distance on our left hand side, and I love mist (besides enjoying driving along in the countryside).

We took a few photos and then headed on towards the Thomas River turnoff. Once we’d tuned left at the Thomas River turnoff, we were on dirt road. It was a good dirt road and my little 2000 model chico golf went smoothly along it other than just before the actual Thomas River Historical Village where it rattled along due to a large amount of little ridges in the road. It wasn’t that bad though, and even a little old-fashioned mini car would have been fine along that section.

And then we were there! Had we blinked we might have missed it. Okay, not quite, but the Thomas River Historical Village is tiny. It didn’t matter that it was tiny, though, and it actually added to the atmosphere of the place. It may have been almost spooky had we been the only ones there, perhaps late at night or on a stormy day.

The day was fine, though, sunny, calm and hot, and there were a few people there already. We were still early enough to choose a good spot to set up our market stall.

It took us nearly two hours to set our stall up to our satisfaction, and then, since we were only expecting shoppers and browsers a little later, I wandered off to take some photos in the area. I couldn’t come all the way from East London, unsure if we’d ever visit Thomas River Historical Village again, and not take some photos of the place.

I didn’t have to wander too far to see things that I wanted to take photos of; the village is tiny, but has plenty of gorgeous photographic opportunities.

I loved coming across a little wagon of some old glass bottles of course, because I love that sort of thing and because I love sea glass. I imagined that some of the pieces of sea glass we have may have come from bottles like these.

Then it was time to be ready at our stall to assist potential customers who were visiting the restaurant for lunch.

We didn’t have a good day of sales, and were grateful that there had not been a stall space fee, leaving only our cost of petrol as a market cost. Our petrol for the trip cost about R180 and we made sales totaling R250. Market profit for the day: R70.

Although we were disappointed with our takings for the day, we were at least happy we hadn’t run at a loss, and we’d had a lovely visit to the Thomas River Historical Village.

Once the market was over it was early afternoon. After helping Tony pack everything away, and carry it back to the car, I left Tony to pack the car while I wandered off in the opposite direction to earlier to take a few more photos.

I marveled at the wonderful and impressive collection of little toy cars, car badges, and other old car things, admired an old telephone outside the old post office, and, generally, just enjoyed feeling like I’d gone back in time, but without the worry of how I’d return to the present.

© Copyright Teresa Schultz 2014