California Vacation - Beaches

Gran, Grand Dad, and Autumn, Xavier, and family invited us to California for a fun vacation with them June 5-10.  We spent two fun days at Disneyland in the comfortable 70-degree weather under overcast skies.  Unfortunately, Jessalyn, Isaac, and Joel had to stay in Pocatello and work.  Scott and I and the four youngest kids had a wonderful time!

My favorite day was our water day on Wednesday.


Emerald and Dallin spent a couple of hours playing in the warm water at the hotel water park Wednesday morning.

Alexander came out, too, but never got far enough in the water to enjoy it.  He insisted it was too cold, and eventually he went back to the hotel room.  Aysha also thought it was too cold to attempt.

Then we drove to Newport Beach.  On the way, we took a scenic detour across Balboa Island.  We took a three-car ferry to the island, then drove off the other side on the bridge.

Although the air was a little cool for getting wet, the sand was so warm and soft at Newport Beach.

We had a little picnic on the sand and watched the kids play.  It wasn't too cold for them to get plenty wet in the ocean!  Then they buried each other in the sand.  Here is Emerald posing as a mermaid:

After a couple of hours at Newport Beach, we headed south along the coastline to find some tidal pools and marine creatures.  We stopped at Crystal Cove, a marine wildlife preserve.  The kids spotted several small lizards along the boardwalk down to the beach.  When we climbed down to the rocks, we discovered that the tidal pools were full of small crabs.  We had a great time climbing among the rocks and watching crabs scurry through the water and hide in crevices.

This is Alexander, happily watching for the "floods" to come, so he could see how high up on his legs the waves would wash:

Then we went to a sandier part of the beach, and played in the waves some more.  One of our favorite parts of Crystal Cove was that there were hardly any other people there.  We had this little section of the cove all to ourselves most of the time we were there.