California coast

We just finished our first week in California, and it was fantastic!  California has been surprising to us.  We've flown into California before, but never driven into it, so we had no idea how much desert there is in California.  Also, we'd mainly visited San Diego before, and I expected the rest of California to have a similarly rocky coast.  We arrived at Pismo Beach, and it was beautiful and sandy.

Ocean sand dunes are the greatest!  As the boys tried jumping down these dunes, they discovered that to keep the sand out of their faces, they needed to zip their coats on backwards and keep their hoods up over their eyes.  This made for some highly entertaining spectacles!

Pismo Creek, which flows into the ocean, was as big a hit as the ocean itself.

We mainly had a great week hanging out near the beach.  This is a quintessential beach campground, so we celebrated B's 10th birthday doing traditional beach camp-y kinds of things: swimming in the heated pool, mini golf, arcade games, and lots of ocean.  Very fun for our now ten-year-old, although I have no idea how he got to be so old!  We love him!

We spent one day driving route 1 north, as we'd heard the coastal highway was very scenic.  The weather was hazy, but it was still beautiful!

We stopped to picnic and play around in this ocean inlet.

We also came to Elephant Seal beach, where the seals were on the beach molting.  A ranger explained a lot of interesting facts about these seals to us.  Did you know they don't eat for the 7-8 weeks while they molt?  Our family, loving to eat, was horrified.

We played on the beach near Monterey a bit, and had a nice road-trip-without-pulling-the-fifth-wheel day.

As my first big mistake of camping reservations, I accidentally didn't reserve enough days at our campground, so we needed to move up to Morro Bay at the end of the week.  This worked out, as the bay was very scenic, with Morro Rock.  It was also very windy, with great kite flying.

That was our week.  Very relaxed exploring, lots of ocean, and generally a perfect week for our family!  Next up is Yosemite - something I've always wanted to see!

I hope all's well with you!  I think you've had warmer weather than we have, and I bet it's a really enjoyable spring!  We've been thinking of Ohio as we're trying to figure out what to do in August.  Pray for us as we try to make the right decisions?  Love to everyone from the Utter Family!