Babilon Family Adventures: April 2014

After living here for three years, this was actually our first Easter spent in SA. We have been home the past two Easters visiting family, so it was a nice change of pace for us.

We chose to visit the beach in Ballito for the holiday. In Pretoria, most families go away for holidays such as Easter and Christmas. They don't focus so much on the gifts and fuss over shopping, decorating and preparing large meals, instead they take a trip together to celebrate. I am growing to like this tradition of the no fuss and an away holiday a lot.

The town of Ballito has a great vibe to it. It is a family oriented surfing town and the people were great. We got to eat amazing food and enjoy the beautiful sunshine and beaches. We stayed at The Vineyard on Ballito, which is a guest house a few blocks from the beach. We really enjoyed it! Friendly staff and delicious breakfast. We did an Easter Egg hunt for the girls and the staff also even hid more chocolate eggs for our girls before breakfast Easter morning.

Gia was able to participate in the Ballito kids Soapbox Derby and won first place in her race. She was really excited. We spent the rest of Easter Sunday at a fun animal farm and then hit the beach. We ended our day with dinner at Gianni's Italian Restaurant. We had some fun adventures along with a few bumps in the road. Gia lost another tooth the day before Easter so we got a visit from the tooth fairy. Then on our last day she was unfortunately stung by a blue bottle jellyfish, which are common here this time of year. She thankfully recovered quickly and the lifeguards were very helpful. We also returned to our guest room to find a patio full of vervet monkeys, which I am terribly afraid of, lol. The kids got a kick out of them and also of me screaming, when I looked up and realized that it was not a cat entering our room, but one of the monkeys. Overall, we really loved Ballito, and I wish we would have visited here more often. Four stars for Ballito!