Seaside Wilderness

It’s just good to get away. It’s good to let the kids play and run. It’s good hearing the ocean and let the wind blow in your hair. It’s good to let the kids get dirty and climb trees. It’s good to let them fall down and get back up again. It’s good to let them kick a ball and chase each other.

When I was little we were always pretending to build tepees out of big sticks and making forts out of logs. We would pick random plants and pretend to be Indians or settlers cooking over a campfire. This was a day that my girls childhood could connect to mine. 

aMAZing Kids

Since we began our travels many days have been filled with venturing to new places and discovering new cities meeting new walks of life… but many days are also spend simply at home in our RV. I am still a stay at home mom and still have to find ways to pass days simply.  For a little while we were getting pretty into our chalk art! We are far from the professionals but we could have fun with it all day long. I decided one day to make a maze for my oldest daughter Leah. She finished it is about six seconds. It probably took me 10 minutes to make that thing for her! So the challenge began! I began making a series of fun and exciting new mazes for her. I also made some simpler ones for her sisters. Here are just a few.

San Diego

“Good morning”

“Good morning”

Want to go to “LA today?”

…”want to go to San Diego?”

“Want to go for a few days?”

“We should check out the border.”

“I want to go snorkeling!”

“I’ll pack the gear. You pack the kids!”

“Kids get dressed!”

 

 

Santa Cruz

On Santa Cruz Wharf. Rainbow glows over the Boardwalk behind us!

We loved Santa Cruz!

 

Boardwalk

Santa Cruz became our hometown on the ocean. It did not start out that way. No, at first it was a little bit of a disappointment. Being truthful it’s not very clean. The roads felt tiny for our oversized vehicle. And I did not feel quite as safe as we had hoped. Our first day in the area and second day in California we went straight to the beach of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. We walked the boardwalk and ate there. We thoroughly enjoyed the ocean.

 

Leah Still 4

Josh and Alisabeth 11mo

Leah 4, Kaylabelle 2, Alisabeth 11 mo

 

It took us a few visits before we seemed to find our niche in the town. We found that we enjoyed the northern half of Santa Cruz the most.

My imaginary line of “northern part of town” begins at the wharf and branches up from there. We loved going on the wharf for only four dollars to park. It was the best place for us to be most days. I think we tried almost every restaurant on the wharf. One of the restaurants (Splash) was still under construction. It has an amazing water fountain outside of it with octopus and other sea creatures on it.

Me drinking from the Pearl Diver

It’s design almost has a Pirates of the Caribbean feel.  One day upon passing this we were able to meet its creator. He also had designed several of the other sculptures in town. As an afterthought I wished we had taken a picture with him. Sean M. Monaghan and his studio/foundry Bronze Worksto created this water fountain, titled Pearl Diver. He was there looking in on some of the renovations.  I believe he designed more within the restaurant. I hope to return some day and see the completed project and have a bite maybe, too.

 

View from top of Wharf

Leah by the Pearl Diver Fountin

Santa Cruz Sea Lion

Veiw off Wharf, Brown Pelican

 

They have a fabulous walking trail right along the coast. It runs along W. Cliff Drive from before Point Santa Cruz through Natural Bridges State Beach.  As you walk and enjoy seagulls flying, waves crashing and misty sea air you can also enjoy the never absent surfers who cluster along the shores. You will pass a beautiful lighthouse along the way and lovely wave crafted rock formations. You will be passed by skateboarders and it is along this trail we saw for the first time bicycles with surfboard carriers.

rack for surfboard on side

Mom girls seeing surfers

catching a wave

Michele/ mom keeping up

 

 

Natural Bridges State Beach

Santa Cruz is the home of one of our favorite beaches. We frequented Natural Bridges State Beach. As its name implies, it boasts a large archway of rock that the rising tides crash through. It was breathtaking!

 

This was the first beach we aspired to picnic on. And though it was not our last (we are avid picnickers) we learned that a picnic on the beach is not always- a picnic on the beach. . . food in the midst of sand, wind, seagulls, and three small children with only one thin blanket to shield. Need I say more?

Here they have a few short trails through marsh land that we trounced apron with the girls. We also loved the tide pools away from the mighty ocean waves. They allowed our little 4, 2, and 12 month old a safe area to splash and wade in the water. We also enjoyed a few good sandcastle attempts but they usually turned out to be the kids drip castles.

Tidepool with marsh behind

Seagulls at Natrule Bridges

Continuing north, in a rather inconspicuous location, we also went to the aquarium. Here is where we first pet a swell shark, ran our curious fingers through the beautiful Giant Green Anemone and awed as we walked along the full size skeletons of whale.

Josh and Kaylabelle 2 touch shark

Guient Green Anemani/ Petting SwellSharks

Outside

This quiet and secluded aquarium is unique for those features and also for its free-to-roam ocean front trails. We played at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center more than once.

Though most days we enjoyed being from the wharf north, we could not omit the harbor from our favorites list. The Santa Cruz Harbor is not massive but charming in its own right. It has a small handful of good restaurants and my favorite gift shop. This combo drew us back many times.

 

The Crows Nest is very good and has a fabulous vista. Beside it stands The Crows Nest gift shop. Here they have a gleaming selection of knick-knacks that I could never seem to want to stop looking through. The gift shop also serve delicious pizza, coffee and desserts! We would, more times than not, order a pizza and sit at a table outside that overlooked the boats passing. The Santa Cruz Breakwater Lighthouse standing and greeting waves and vessels alike. How pleasant. How peaceful.

And this is how was chose to spend out first Christmas away from home. The harbor lit up! They light up all of the sailboats for a Christmas boat parade. We ate pizza and enjoyed an illuminated harbor.

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Lodi Science Center

We love science centers! This little one is filled with so many fascinating experiments. You always love a place that you can take your kids to and say “Touch whatever you want.” It is smaller then  most we have been to. But then my children are 5, 3 and almost 2. This science center is just enough for my kids to play hard and then go home and take a nap. But more importantly it was here that I found out that their is a membership called ASTC Travel Passport Program. I found that if you sight up you become a member at hundreds more science centers across the US and the world. This sounded perfect for full time travelers like us! After viewing the extensive list of all the science centers included we signed up!

You can look into this option and view the impressive list for yourself at http://www.astc.org

Fresh Citrus

We spent five months in San Jose, California. They say it is an interesting city. It is the Center for many technological industries. Places such as Google, Apple, Netflix, Intel and many more are headquartered in San Jose.

San Jose as a place to live, is different.  I would have to say it is not my favorite town to live in. One of the things we found was that there isn’t really a good side of town and a bad side of town. It’s all intertwined. We would drive two blocks and feel like we were in a wonderful neighborhood and then two blocks later feel like you need to stay in the car with the doors locked. Now some of the suburbs are of course nice. We particularly liked the southwest side of town. That is where my husband worked. And then places like Los Gatos are quite nice. But when I referred to “in San Jose, I speak primarily of the city itself.

Also you are paying San Francisco Bay area prices without all of the perks. That is, things like the ocean and the charm of San Francisco. There are no beaches and it is pretty hot and dry in the summer. Furthermore, we could not seem to escape the bad stench that floated about the north east side of the city.

One of the things that we truly did love though was that fruit trees grow everywhere. Where we stayed they had lemon trees, grapefruit trees, orange trees and avocado trees.

We spent many days picking fruit and making had squeezed  lemonade, orange juice, and grapefruit juice. We made lemon zest and orange zest, lemon scones, lemon blueberry pancakes, lemon bread with orange jam… Mmmmmmm! It was wonderful! We even made lemon marmalade which was not my favorite actually. But fun to make! The kids and I could not get enough of it. Many of the locals seemed to take these treasures for granted but our zeal for this endeavor seemed to attract new attention buy some. And it was a great way for us to make new friends. One local in particular (Marilyn) taught us that the only way to get a grapefruit out of the massive grapefruit tree was with a picker! She would take us picking regularly and by the end of the summer we had purchased our own picker.

I remember when we had first arrived one of our neighbors mentioning that there was an avocado tree in the park. My children and I spent quite a bit of time (weeks really) looking into trees and poking about the park trying to discover which tree carried this delicious fruit! I am sure we looked quite suspicious  nosing about everybody’s campsites. But alas it paid off! And this tree was so much larger than I had anticipated! It was the largest tree in the whole park and the man living under the avocado tree came outside when he saw me gazing up into this tree. He asked me if I would like some avocados. I said that I would. So he went into his shed and pulled out a picker and a ladder and picked four avocado for me.  The tree was so large that he had to have a 12 foot picker while standing on a ladder to reach the avocados. I would have never dreamed such a small fruit could come from such an enormous tree.

While in California we have also discovered that there are many different kinds of avocados. They have different flavors and different textures. I found one in Southern California that is very round and very creamy and it has great flavor. The one in San Jose was a little leaner and the flavor was a little more bitter. All this opened my eyes to a world beyond the same old same old store bought avocados.