Planning a Cape show weekend so it is worth the petrol

Weather sets most of it. Outdoor displays cluster in the dry half of the year because nobody wants a concours lawn turning to mud, and the big indoor expos avoid the school holidays when half the city is in Hermanus or Plettenberg Bay. That leaves a pattern you can plan around: indoor shows in the shoulder weeks, lawns and club gatherings when the south-easter is blowing but the ground is hard.

The second factor is freight. Cars for a large expo come down by road or rail, and a Cape hall is two days further from the inland staging yards than a Gauteng one. Stands here are therefore smaller and the display cars are often the ones that have already toured, which has one advantage nobody mentions: the demonstrator you sit in has usually been sat in by three hundred other people, so you see how the cabin materials age. That is more useful than a car fresh off the truck.

Every hall publishes a plan. Print it, or at least download it so load-shedding at home does not leave you without it, and mark three things: the stands you must see, the stands you will see if time allows, and the two places you can sit down. Then draw a line through the hall in one direction. Walking a loop rather than ricocheting between the corners you remember will cut two kilometres off your day inside the building, and in a hall of that size two kilometres is a real saving.

Put the must-see stands in the first ninety minutes. Doors usually open at ten, and until about half past eleven you can sit in a car without queueing and have a sensible conversation with the person on the stand. After that it becomes a crowd, and after two in the afternoon the back of a popular car has a queue of four people and a child asleep across the rear bench.

This matters more than show organisers seem to think. At the larger venues the walk from the far parking rows to the first door is six hundred to eight hundred metres, often across tar in full sun, and then you are on polished concrete for four hours. If you have a knee or a hip that complains, pay for the closer parking, which runs somewhere around sixty to ninety rand more on the day, and consider being dropped at the entrance instead.

We go further than that now. We park facing out, we leave a two-litre bottle of water in the car for the walk back, and we take a small folding stick-chair if the show has an outdoor section. There is no dignity cost to sitting down in the middle of a hall. The people who look uncomfortable at four o'clock are the ones who insisted on standing from ten.

Three things, mainly. First, scale: a boot quoted at four hundred and eighty litres means nothing until your own cabin bag is in it, which is why we bring one. Second, ingress: you learn in four seconds whether you drop into a car or step across into it, and for a sixty-five-year-old hip that single fact outranks most of the spec sheet. Third, the quality of the surfaces you actually touch, which is the door pull, the indicator stalk and the edge of the centre console, not the trim panel on the passenger side that photographs well.

What a hall cannot tell you is everything to do with movement, and that is most of the car. Ride over a patched surface, road noise on coarse Cape tar, how the aircon copes after the car has stood in the sun at Canal Walk, whether the suspension crashes over a speed hump at thirty. Hold those questions. The hall is for narrowing six cars to two.

If the show runs over a weekend and your ticket allows it, or if a second ticket is a hundred and twenty rand, go twice. The first visit is reconnaissance and it is always too fast. The second visit is where you sit in the same two cars again, in a calmer frame of mind, and notice that one of them has a rear door that opens only to about sixty degrees, which makes helping an elderly parent into the back a two-person job.

Our honest opinion: one long day at a show is worse than two short ones, and most people would get more out of four focused hours on a Sunday morning than out of eight hours on the Saturday. Attention is the scarce thing at an expo, not time.