Driving in to the show hall, and getting home afterwards

From Durbanville or Bellville you are looking at twenty-five to thirty-five kilometres to the city bowl venues, and the N1 inbound is slow from about half past six until nine. If a show opens at ten there is no reason to be in that traffic at all. Leave at half past eight, or take the M5 and come in along the lower road, which is longer in kilometres and usually shorter in minutes once you include the queue at the Koeberg interchange.

From Paarl, Stellenbosch or Somerset West, budget fifty to seventy kilometres and an hour, and remember that the return leg in the late afternoon is the worse one. Anybody driving back towards Stellenbosch between four and six is going to sit, and sitting is tiring in a way that distance is not. We would rather leave a hall at three with one stand unseen than crawl out of the city at five.

Sir Lowry's Pass is the ordinary route in from the Overberg and it is fine in the dry. In winter it is a different road: low cloud sits on the top, the wind pushes hard across the open section, and the surface holds water in the ruts. Drop twenty kilometres an hour from whatever feels natural, put your lights on even at midday so the car behind can see you, and do not overtake the truck. There is no version of that overtake that saves you more than ninety seconds.

Du Toitskloof gives you a choice: the tunnel on the N1, which costs a toll and takes the weather out of the equation, or the old pass over the top, which is beautiful, slow and about eleven kilometres longer. We take the old pass in good weather and the tunnel when the mountain is wet. Coming back in the late afternoon with the sun ahead of you on the old pass is genuinely unpleasant, and that is the one time we always use the tunnel.

The Cape road network ages in a particular way. A good surface takes one wet winter, loses its seal at the edges, and by the second winter there is a line of potholes exactly where the left wheel tracks. On the R44, the R45 and most of the secondary roads through the Winelands, that means the safest line is slightly further right than instinct wants, and it means tyre sidewall height is not a cosmetic choice. A tyre with a taller sidewall will survive an edge strike that will crack a low-profile rim.

Roadworks are the other constant. Stop-go sections on the regional roads run for anything from two to seven kilometres and the wait can be twelve minutes, so a show that is seventy kilometres away is not a seventy-kilometre journey, it is a seventy-kilometre journey plus whatever the works add. Check before you leave and keep water in the car.

Run the numbers once and the decision gets easier. A hundred-kilometre round trip in a petrol car doing nine litres per hundred costs roughly two hundred rand in fuel at current pump prices, give or take, and a diesel bakkie on the same run will be similar once you account for the heavier consumption. Add the toll if you use the Huguenot tunnel, add parking of forty to a hundred and twenty rand, add the ticket, and a show day for two people lands somewhere between six hundred and a thousand rand before you buy a coffee.

That is not an argument against going. It is an argument for going on the right day, staying the useful four hours, and not driving ninety kilometres for a show with eleven stands. We have done that, more than once, and the drive home was quiet in the way that a wasted Saturday is quiet.

Winter shows end at five and it is dark by six, which puts you on the road at the worst time. Clean the inside of the windscreen before you go; the film that builds up on the glass is invisible in daylight and turns every oncoming headlight into a star. Check that your own lights are both working, because a single failed bulb on the left is how you end up stopped at a roadblock on the N2 at seven in the evening.

If you are tired, stop. There is a petrol station every thirty or forty kilometres on the main routes, the coffee is adequate, and fifteen minutes parked under the lights is better than the last twenty kilometres driven on willpower. Load-shedding complicates the last part of the trip at home: if your garage door is electric and the schedule has caught your block, you want a key for the pedestrian gate in your pocket rather than in the kitchen.