I mentioned our little family vacay and break from reality last week and today I thought I would share a bit more of our travels with you. It’s always interesting when you travel with young kids and the road ahead is never an easy one especially when you are traveling by car. If you happen to be traveling a road paved with ocean views, well then all the better to suffer the rest with. We were planning to head down to Southern California for a few days and hit some of our favorite kid-centric theme parks and the beach. At the last minute we decided to break up our long drive down by stopping half way to stay in a coastal town near Hearst Castle. It’s been a dream of mine to walk the grounds of that massive compound filled with historic architectural goodness and I am happy to report I got to do precisely that!
It takes nearly 5 hours to travel from my neck of the woods to Cambria, which lies south of Monterey along the coast. For those of you who have ever enjoyed the company of a toddler on a long car ride, you know how precious those calm moments can be when they are sleeping for any portion of the drive. The Bird, is not the greatest of travelers, and can exhaust even the most experienced of child wranglers in a matter of minutes. I kid you not. I count myself lucky that we had 45 minutes of absolute peace and quiet with his short little nod off, and I managed to capture the moment on film as it so rarely happens. Pure bliss… and hey, as it turns out, proof of my existence, which also rarely happens, since I’m virtually always behind the camera. Perhaps I should turn that camera around in selfie mode more often… probably not though. Not precisely my style. But who knows, life is full of surprises, eh?
We only stayed one night in this most adorable little town of Cambria, but I will cherish the couple of days we spent there, forever. As luck would have it, the only hotel room we could find at the very last minute was right on the ocean. It was terrible and I hated every second of it. Obviously I’m kidding.
It was ridiculous and mind blowing and I didn’t waste one second of my time there – soaking in the views and enjoying the local fare.
We spend quite a bit of time hitting the beaches of Lake Tahoe in the summertime, and Penn seems to remember how fond of playing in the sand he is. He was asking about the beach for days prior to our trip and neither of these babes could wait a single minute to get their toes in the sand… or their shovels… and of course their buckets. Blake is pretty consistently on a mission to build and create great and amazing structures in the sand, while Penn is constantly out to destroy. It isn’t exactly a match made in beachy heaven for those two but they still manage get more sand in their ears and eyes than you can imagine and they always enjoy every second of it.
Even the restaurant next to our hotel had amazing views and was right on the ocean. I’ve decided I think it makes the food taste just a bit better, but the food was pretty spectacular all on it’s own.
We watched the sun set while we walked along the path above the water and it was breathtaking. I could watch the waves forever, it’s absolutely mesmerizing to me, and this particular place was more beautiful than I can capture with my camera.
If you follow along with me on Instagram then you might already know that we had breakfast at the most delicious bakery that happened to have gluten free muffins. As a gal who can’t have gluten without some fairly upsetting consequences, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to get to eat a muffin. It was absolutely divine. I wish the remainder of our trip was as carefree and wonderful as the beginning was, but we can’t have everything in life, now can we. It was all still magical because it was the first real vacation we have ever taken as a family, sadly. We manage to sneak in some trips here and there when the mister and I have conferences or work related events, but this was purely vacation which made it extra-special. I think my mind is still sitting on the beach somewhere and it is taking me much longer to jump back in to work life than I expected.
PLACES OF NOTE //
If you have a chance to explore a bit of the Central California Coast, I highly recommend making a stop in Cambria. It was splendid.
