Pismo Beach, California

So we've been home from CA officially a week, and I figured I may just do these posts in parts because I took a LOT of pictures! Somewhere around 300! Yeah, I know, crazy. But it's easy to do in a new place and on vacation. I posted some on FB and some were duplicates so I promise I won't post all of them on here, even if in parts, but I will post let's say the highlight's or the best ones.

We left on the 22nd and flew from here to LA where we had a small 2 hour layover and then caught a much smaller plane to San Louis Obispo (the kids crashed before we even took off and caught a short 45 min nap) where we all rented cars and made the short drive to Pismo Beach....on a back road, through some vineyards...very pretty. We made the trip with my mom's family, in part to celebrate my my grandfather's 85th birthday. The kids did really well on the flight over.  For the most part, they sat still and we had no crying or screaming incidents. Thank goodness I was not THE person you dread having on a plane with cranky kids. It probably helped it was an early flight and not later in the day for a 3 hour flight into LAX. I always wonder when people see kids get on a plane if they are thinking to themselves, " Oh great, small kids! This should be fun." We were spared the anguish of having to deal with that. The kids each brought their own small backpacks, which they wheeled and carried themsleves, packed with fun stuff for the plane and they were for the most part entertained. Cole didn't really understand why you need to stay buckled when the seat belt sign is on or why we couldn't always have the tray table down, but sometimes you just can't reason with a 2 yr old to make them understand. LOL.

Pismo Beach is a very small town on the Pacific Coast Highway about 3 hours north of LA. Gorgeous!! Great weather, great views, and great food. We ate LOTS of seafood during the week. This was our view everyday from our hotel balcony! In the mornings, the tide would be so high you couldn't really walk down there and the water was inside the "cave" but I was just waiting to find a time to get the kids down there.

We followed that white fence to what I will refer to as the "stairs from Hell". Sorry for my speech, but they were AWFUL. Not so bad going down....easy peasy...but I was sucking air on the way back up. Go ahead and laugh because I can NOW, but then, I didn't think they would end. I should've taken a picture. Let's just say I burned some fat off of my legs that day.

But once we got down, this was the other side of that "cave"...we walked around and let the kids explore and check it out...

and run down the beach...

                            We found sand dollars and crabs and wrote our names in the sand...

and we made it about half way down to the Pismo beach pier....

and then turned around let the kids race daddy back to the stairs and burn some more energy...can you tell mommy walked behind them and just snapped pictures!? Good thing I did, I had no idea how awful those stairs were going to be going back up.