What do cute little penguins, colourful gems and vintage toys have in common? Simon’s Town that’s what. As our last ode to the holidays before heading back to work, we spent the day out in Simon’s Town with friends, and the kids of course. We headed to Boulder’s beach as our first stop.
Boulders Beach
We’ve never been to this beach with the kids. Not once in 8 years have we even tried. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it’s because you have to pay to get in, or the smell of the penguins or even the crazy distance from our house that put us off. That sounds bad, but it is among a few of the reasons that we’ve never gone.
Despite never going with them, the amount of times that we have spoken about the penguin beach is actually notable. How do they even know about it? But they do and so it was finally time to head out there. Luckily you can do that and really spend the day out there because there is so much to do in the area.
We spent a small fortune getting our family of 5 through the door… OK, I exaggerate, but R270 is not exactly a cheap day out. The good news is that since then, I have been told about this My Green Card that you can get through SanParks. You pay R145 or something for one adult and they can bring up to 5 additional people with you TWELVE times in the year. You can use it at any of these places – Cape of Good Hope (Cape Point); Boulders Penguin Colony, Oudekraal and Silvermine, as well as to the braai and picnic areas at Tokai, Newlands and Perdekloof. More rules here. Pretty sweet I must say, so I thought I’d share that with you.
Moving on.
We spent the morning at Boulders. What a really fantastic beach. I really love all the boulders which protect you from the wind. It’s great. The only sucky thing would be being there at high tide. But at low tide it’s perfection. The staff are friendly and super helpful helping all of our crew to get over and through all the boulders.
If I was a swimming person, I would definitely swim here. I’m not a swimming person though, but even I dipped my toes in the water.
It was lovely. In hindsight we would probably have planned better to have been able to spend the whole day there instead of just a couple of hours.
We spent the morning swimming, building sandcastles and collecting beautiful shells.
But one of the things that I really wanted to do now that we were in this area, was to go to the
Scratch Patch
I remember growing up with tin of gems at my grandmothers house. Every other week we’d pull them out and my brother and I would play the weirdest games with them. Ever since I have wanted to go to the Scratch Patch. Plus Riya is currently obsessed with bringing every little rock that she can find into our house.
What I like about this place is that you only pay for the bag that you take in – not entry for everyone. That’s pretty sweet.
The good news is that everything that we found is still sitting in their little baggies. I thought it would be all over the house, so that’s cool.
We (the kids and Seth – not me) had an ice cream there before we headed to our next stop.
LUNCH!
We decided to just head out to where Just Nuisance is and then we’d decide from there. We ended up at a restaurant that didn’t have any beers or drinks on the menu. Only after did we see that they did have somehow. Ugh. But it had a good view even though the food was quite average unfortunately.
We popped in to the toy museum that has a cool little train track and some stuff that you can buy if that’s your thing.
It’s funny though because there are so many great little shops and restaurants that we would not even have hesitated wandering through if we didn’t have kids with us. Maybe we’ll head out there alone one day and do all those things.
