Mitchell's Sun City Birthday

For Mitchell''s birthday this year we took a weekend trip to Sun City. Sun City is about a 2.5 hour drive from Pretoria just outside of Pilanisburg National Park. Basically, its a large resort with 4 different hotels, a casino, several restaurants, and a wide variety of family activities.  We stayed at The Palace of the Lost City Hotel, and I think the name says it all. Every detail of this hotel was based off of a lost African palace. Though Chase and I have never been at the theme hotels of Disney or Atlantis in the Bahamas we imagine that they are similar to this. It's clear that every inch of the hotel was carefully thought out. Sun City's latest claim to fame is that it was used for filming the Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore movie Blended. The hotel they shot most of the movie in was actually The Palace. After returning from our trip we had to rent Blended to see how it looked. They change several things for the movie, but for the most part the hotel is the same and a lot of attractions with the exception of riding an Ostrich... that was not an option for us, but it was in the movie!

Main Lobby - standing underneath the large dome of the hotel

Large Elephant statue on the way to the water park

Staircase leading from The Palace to Valley of the Waves

View driving up to the hotel

around the hotel were various walking paths with small waterfalls. One evening we went for a walk and took pictures for our Christmas card.

This is the fountain at the front of the hotel. I was obsessed with it! 

We spent most of the weekend poolside either at our hotel or at Sun City's water park Valley of The Waves. Valley of the Waves reminded me of many of the water parks back home, they had a large wave pool three water slides, a lazy river, and a great area for younger children.  Mitchell had just met the height requirement for the slides and didn't think twice about going down them. Once he went a couple of times he was hooked. He probably would have been happy to ride the slides all day had we let him! Chase and I enjoyed the slides also, but we were both to chicken to do the tallest slide a 98ft sheer drop entitled the "Temple of Courage".

First day at the pool and the place was empty

View of the Hotel from the pool

View from hotel to the pool

We found the food at Sun City to be just okay nothing really over impressed us.  We ate at several restaurants around the resort, but everyone agreed that the breakfast at our hotel was the best! Our buffet breakfast choices included everything from fresh waffles, omelets, prime rib, and sushi! To top it all off they handed me a mimosa as I walked in. Technically, they gave me the choice of fresh juice or champagne and I asked them to mix the two. I haven't seen a mimosa on a menu yet here in Africa, apparently they don't believe in ruining their sparkling wine with juice!  It was by far the best "complimentary breakfast" I have had at a hotel.
One of the perks of Sun City is that they have a sitting service that will come to your room in the evenings, a few friends who have been there tried it out so we weren't too nervous to give it a go. This gave Chase and I the opportunity to go out to dinner just the two of us. We had thought of checking out the casino as well, but decided we were both too tired to scope it out.

Boys having dinner in the room

enjoying a drink at the bar

Since it was Mitchell's birthday weekend we really let him choose what we all did. While there were various activities to check out we ended up making it to the arcade a couple of times and to the Crocodile Sanctuary. The Crocodile Sanctuary located at Sun City is home to over 300 Nile Crocodiles. I had injured my foot the day before we left for this vacation so I didn't mind staying close to the hotel, as walking all over the area would have been a bit of a nightmare.

Boys with their arcade prizes! 

Over all it was a great little getaway! I asked Mitchell if he was sad he didn't have a party this year and he said "Not at all, this weekend was AWESOME!"