Pictures are my friend, because I have a hard time knowing which words to use to tell my story. Our stories happen to be usually long, disjointed, and generally confusing, because that is how our vacations and normal family life occur. Hence, pictures save me by telling their own story, or at least give me a starting point for sharing.
Each of the last few summers, for different reasons, Craig hasn’t been able to take vacation. So the kids and I pack up to have one last week or so of fun, before the summer is over. This year, we chose a warm beach, because that isn’t what we live next too.
Our first night at the beach I had found a campsite at a beach campground. Not that ours was on the sand, instead our spot was at the other edge of camp, with a road right on the other side of our campsite. Kids, welcome to the big city! A minute of walking brought us to the beach.
The first day we had tried playing on the beach where are campground was located. The next day we found our favorite beach, which we came back to repeatedly.
Even I was coaxed out into the water. Usually I’m a pansy about getting cold, or even the thought of being cold. Not a problem here!
That night we had to move to a different campground, since we made last minute plans and just took what happened to be open. This beach was down in San Clemente, with an awesome feeling of being carefree at sunset.
We took a break from the beaches for one day, when I took the kids to Santa Monica. That was a more hectic day, finding food and staring at all the new sights. I think I only took a few photos here, spending more of my time doing what Jo was.
Back to the beach. I think we spent every other day at the beach, playing as long and hard as we could.
One of my favorite photos was this one of the five oldest all catching a wave at once, which is a little harder than it looks when some are half the size of the biggest.
Jo felt pretty happy that she was the only one out of all of them to hang on until the end.
Playing at the beach wiped us out. We had to recoup by wandering around the local areas with no agenda.
This is my staged shot. I made them line up and walk towards me, mainly since I wanted to get them in one shot all at once, with a neat background.
Of course, we brought rocks home.
Make that two staged shots. I see other photography blogs of California photographers using the pier as a neat background and figured I should get that iconic type of shot. The one thing about taking photos on vacation is that the light isn’t always my favorite, but the subjects of the photos are!
Eight days and 2000 miles later, we still managed to be happy about spending time together. That makes my heart glad!
