First Family Vacation

*Disclaimer: This happened months ago!  We are very behind on blogging! Trying to get caught up this week. Beware, there will probably be lots of posts coming!

Cape Town is one of those places that I had hoped to visit while living in SA.  Lucky for me, I got to go twice in one month!!  I am pretty sure I could live there.  If you have been following the blog, you would have seen that when my mom visited in October, we decided to fly to Cape Town for a few days.  Lee was mad because he has always wanted to go and I was going without him.  Little did he know that 2 weeks later the Embassy needed him to go down there for work.  His trip was going to be over our 3rd Anniversary, so we decided we would just make a family trip out of it.  Our FIRST Carnell Family vacation!

View from our room

We accidentally got booked in a HUGE Luxury Suite at the Table Bay Resort, which is where all the big shots stay when they go to Cape Town.  Lee was on per diem and they put him in that hotel knowing that we were coming with him and thought it would be a good location.  The luxury suite was a mistake, but the hotel decided that since we had a baby, they would let us stay with no extra charge!  SCORE! I guess that memo didnt make it to the staff, because they treated us like we were VIP.  When we arrived, the manager was waiting at the curb, knew our names and whisked us away to our room where they do "in-room check in for our VIPs."  Lee and I were looking at each other making faces and laughing at what was happening.  Who did they think we were?!

Every night our beds were turned down with rose petals all over the room, and robes and slippers laid out for us

They even had rubber duckies and a kid themed bath mat for Kinley

The treatment we got the week that we were there was amazing.  We cannot say enough wonderful things about the hotel.  They even brought us goodies and a chocolate mousse cake on our Anniversary.  But enough about that.  We went the weekend before Lee had to work so he could actually get out and see the sites. We went on beautiful drives on the coast and through the winelands.
We stopped in Fish Hoek so Lee could feel how cold the ocean is over here!

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous

But OH SO COLD! (That is just from it touching his feet)

On Sunday we drove to Hermanus, which is the best land based whale watching spot in the world.

We got there and figured we would be lucky if we were able to see anything.  We thought we would walk around and get lunch and just hope for the best.  As we were walking to find a place to eat, we heard this loud horn blowing.  I told Lee that it was probably someone signaling that there were whales.  He thought I was stupid.  But sure enough, they have Whale Criers that walk the cliffs and look for the whales.  Then you just follow the sound of their horn until you get the spot where you can see them!

These are Southern Right Whales.  So amazing. 

We saw about 10 throughout the day and it was so cool to just hang out on the cliffs and watch them. As we were about to leave for the day we were packing up the car which was parked right on a cliff overlooking the ocean.  We had some trash that needed to be thrown away, so I quickly ran over to throw it in before we took off.  But as I got closer there was this large furry thing sitting on top of the trashcan.  It of course freaked me out, so I yelled to Lee and said, "What is THAT?" As soon as I turned to point at it so Lee could see, we saw this:

Breeching whales!  It was the perfect ending to a perfect day.  It's a good thing I saw that furry animal, or we might have missed it.  But we sat there for a few more minutes and saw the whale breech several more times.

On the drive home, we saw a sign for Betty's Bay.  We had to stop and take a picture just for my mom! :) We are glad we did though, because we saw a little sign with a penguin on it and an arrow.  We followed it and found this huge colony of penguins on the beach.  I stayed in the car with sleeping Kinley, but Lee got to see hundreds of them.