Red Engine

This week we are learning about transport, so we took the girls to the James Hall Museum of Transport in Johannesburg. The fire engine you see in the backround has a wooden ladder! The top of the ladder is completely black and the rest of it you can see how the varnish had bubbled in the heat. I stood imagining what kind of fires it had been sent to put out.

But before we had gotten to this technology, we had been through the horse driven carts. What interested me was the cart that belonged to the everyday driver or businessman. It was complete with a seat on the back for the "groomer". Now a groomer was a young man paid to sit on the back of the cart and when they pulled up to a gate of any sort, it was the groomer that had to hop down, run and open the gate, wait for the cart to go through, close it again and then hop back up. So, even back then, men had "remote gate openers" they were just called groomers. Haaaa ha ha

My husband and I reminised about cars we remembered as children and the old petrol pumps we used to see.

We had a lovely day!