When I entered the giveaway on A Gorgeous Life to win tickets to the Paarl Ommniberg Round The Rock Festival, I did what I usually do – imagined I won and how I would spend the day away from my kids while sipping on new wines overlooking beautiful vineyards. Perfect way to celebrate our upcoming (21 March) 7 year wedding anniversary right?
In reality I never win. Well hardly ever, because I won this time! YAY!!! Unfortunately our baby sitters just happened to have booked a cruise for the afternoon and couldn’t help out. So we decided to go anyway, with all three poppets (who happened to be sick). I know what you’re thinking…
True to form we left the house at least 2 hours later than I wanted to, with only getting the kids fed first, without the tickets printed and without even knowing where Paarl was on the map. After heading off on the N2 I decided to just quickly consult the map and what do you know?! Well, to go to Paarl the quickest route is the N1, so we directed and we were finally on our way. It felt like we were in the car for a while but it only took us 30 minutes to get there, which means that it’s just on our doorstep – I can’t believe that we don’t come out this way more often. But according to Knox, it was not long enough for him to enjoy his morning sleep – so he just abandoned it completely… Which made the day so much more awesome.
Our first stop was Laborie (which happens to be the first farm on your left when you start down the Paarl Main Road but it was on our hit list of farms to go to). By this time it was 12.30. It was cooking hot, we were hungry and worried that our tickets wouldn’t work because they were only on our phones, Seth was not in the mood and the kids were a bit bummed that there weren’t any pigs and stuff.
We had no problem with the tickets and checked out what the farm had to offer. We had just missed the grape stomping, but there was a table with face paints and regular paint for this kids to paint with. We may have stopped there first which meant that they didn’t want to go anywhere else. After begging and pleading with them we walked around and got a taster of the Shiraz (yummy) and looked around to find some food. There were boerie rolls and pancakes. None of which Seth and I could happily eat. So we stood inline to get the kids some pancakes. After standing in the line for 10 minutes without an end in sight, we decided to lass it.
So yes, we were the ones carrying a screaming 3 year old and a screeching 1 year old through the crowd to the parking lot.
We got back into the car after some more drama and headed out to see what else Paarl had to offer. After driving around aimlessly and getting irritated we went to a farm that we know – Fairview.
Initially I was a bit skeptical about this farm. Only because I know how popular it is usually and I didn’t feel like too many people. But it turns out that they cater for crowds really well. I hardly even noticed everyone, we even managed to get a table at the restaurant rather quickly – which was a huge relief as we were pretty much starving at this point. We devoured our food and had a glass of vino before we headed out to explore the farm a bit.
We met a horse who scared the bejeebers out of the kids every time that he neighed. Knox literally jumped every single time – even when we were really far away, then we got up close and personal with some goats, a few sheep and three gorgeous little lambs. They were just so sweet!
Then the craving for something sweet hit. We couldn’t fight it. So we left Fairview and stopped in at the farm right next door – Spice Route.
I must quickly just state that this is possibly the best thing we did all day. This place is amazing. Not only is it visually appealing but get this, it has wine tasting, a swanky restaurant, biltong and barley tasting, a tea room, a pizzeria AND chocolate, coffee and ice cream tasting! This was the wine farm jackpot for sure.
We stopped to finally try a “young wine”. It was only in the barrel for a short while and still needed to go through quite a few processes before it landed in the bottle. Honestly, I couldn’t get passed the feet smell and couldn’t bring myself to even try it. I’m quite glad for the next few processes…
Since we popped in here for tea it was only logical that we went to the tea room. This place was just too sweet – I love how it was well thought out. Everything fit the shabby chic, tea room theme – even the lights were silver teapots – too lovely for words. We stopped for coffee, brownies and cupcakes that the girls could decorate themselves. When I asked them later, they mentioned that this was definitely the highlight of their day.
We decided that it wouldn’t be smart to leave until it was a safe bedtime for Knox to actually sleep all the way through the night and not wake up as soon as we got home or worse – the crack of dawn, so we went and wondered around the rest of the farm. That’s when we found it. The chocolate tasting! It was a no brainer. Even with 3 very overtired kids that wanted nothing to do with sitting still on chairs, we were going to sit through that tasting. We tried unprocessed cacao pods, a variety of different chocolates with origins from all over the world. SOOOO interesting and yummy!
If we were on our own, we would have actually tried some wine before settling on something delicious to have with our pizza as we watched the sun go down. But the kids were so beyond tired and we just knew that it was time to go before things got crazy.
So although we may not have tried like, any wine and left without purchasing any bottles or anything, it was so much fun to have a day out in Paarl and experience so many new things. We are DEFINITELY going to go back to the Spice Route. That ice cream has my name on it!
*This post is not sponsored – we won the tickets and I thought you may enjoy checking out what’s available should you ever find yourself in Paarl*
3 Kids, 2 Dogs, 1 Old House 
next time, you can get to Paarl from my house too… just drop the kids with us and go enjoy yourselves