In the past, fall vacation has always meant a cabin or bed and breakfast in the woods, leaves changing, cold air... but this year we hit the beach.

The first day, (Thursday Sept. 25) we took our time getting packed, loaded up and headed to San Jose to meet a friend for lunch.  We had lunch with Annie, who is a long time family friend of Carl that did our wedding pictures.  It was good to get caught up with her and the photography studio adventure. 

We cruised on out to Monterey Bay via 101 through Morgan Hill and San Juan Bautista.  It was super foggy when we arrived, which was just such a fantastic change!  Walked our way down to Cannery Row to pick a cozy, great little restaurant right over the water.  The fog and chill in the air was just so wonderful relative to the icky Sac. heat! 

The next morning we walked from our hotel which was right on Cannery Row to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  It was amazing!  We enjoyed every exhibit, and my favorite was the jelly fish.  They just seemed so unreal or surreal depending on how you look at them. 

The girls did really well with the amount of walking we put them through (left the strollers home) in admiring (almost) everything before them.  Corina's favorite were crabs in any form; horseshoe, dungeous, etc.  Addie liked the sea horses and Carl liked the eels.  Corina and Addie also loved the surge wave, which looks like a waterfall from the outside.  On the inside is glass and you see the water wooosh out.  On the outside, everytime it wooshed, they screamed and ran away all giddy.

After spending all morning at the aquarium, we left for Grover Beach to meet up and stay with our good friends Adrian and Lauren.  Adrian recently joined the homeowner club, which was a rock throw (2 blocks) away from Bill and Trish's house.  It was to be an inauguration of the home with the kiddos!!  We all enjoyed ourselves at Rosa that first night as it just felt so warm to hang out. 

Of course, the girls had fun playing with Bill and Trish's boys, Jaston (almost 3) and Toby (1 1/2).  Bunch of would-be hoodlums, Carl says.  Already, Billy having Jaston making moves.  So, we just had to take all the kids to Avila beach (fogged in at Grover Beach).  Whadya know, the girls just fell in LOVE playing in the sand.  After that all we heard was "Can we go to the beach, can we go to the beach?" 

Sunday was a little breakfast at Honeymoon in Pismo Beach, a walk on the pier

and then the CACA's went to Morro Bay for some milling around and good 'ole fashioned fish n' chips and clam chowder for lunch.  Got to see our first (Addie and Corina) harbor seals there.  We came back to GB, took some naps and then hit up the last concert in the park.  Band was The JB Project and they just rocked.  Also foggy, which just added to that mellow feel.  We ended the night with a BBQ at the Kesselrings with more friends rather than packing it all up to bail on a Sunday.  Such those days are gone when you have paid vacation!!! 

It was a very meaningful and great visit with everyone on the Central Coast.

After our 3 days in Grover Beach, it was to go back north to Santa Cruz.  The Boardwalk was closed, but no matter, we played on the beach some more!! Heard lots of loud mouth sea lions too!!  We took a little dip in the hotel pool and then went down to the pier for dindin.  On the way, we checked out the locals that owned the pier -- Sea Lions!!  We got pretty close and finished with a splendid sunset.

The next morning (Tuesday) we headed to Alamo (near Walnut Creek) to visit our friends Derek and Sara and their kids Carly ( and Gavin (5 1/2).  We had not seen them since 2005 (Encinitas) so it was really nice to spend some time (long overdue) with them.  We went to Carly's soccer practice (not sure if Addie and Corina took a liking), had dinner at their house, caught up on things, and then headed home.  We kind of wish we had Snausage with us to hang out with Mia.  What a reunion that would have been as they met in Durango back in 2001 some time.  Alas, we got home around 9:30pm and the girls were very tired but happy.

Overall it was a great balance of being with many good friends, and our own family time.  It really helped us feel that much more comfortable with the move back to California.

This blog has an excerpt of pictures from the trip.  We used a Canon Rebel T1i, a digital SLR, for testing out such a beefy camera.  So not all the settings were picked right, but what we got was still pretty darn good. 

You can see all our pictures of all the fun in the Gallery, under Carl.