San Clemente Vacation

Beach Fun We spent last week soaking up some sun on the beach in San Clemente, CA. This was our second year going with friends from Arizona(pictured below) and it was such a blast! We spent hours on the beach. The kids had a great time with friends and various activities as you'll see . . .

Taft absolutely loved jumping the waves. I wish I could post all the pics I took with his varying faces as it was fun to watch him so enjoying himself. Playing with the seaweed and . . .

. . .digging were other favorite pastimes. Elaine and Taft spent hours digging up sand crabs and just filling buckets with water and sand. I think at one count Elaine had 24 sand crabs and her friend Eleanor an additional 25.

Elaine is buried up to her neck here in the sand with some other of our friends' kids. It was a funny site to see these heads lined up along the beach. Dave was quite speedy at it and I think only took about 2 minutes to bury a child. It took quite a bit longer to wash all the sand off Ü

Briggy wasn't the biggest fan of the sand and surf. This was the only time he actually ventured off the mats to get his toes wet. He spent a lot of time just napping under the umbrella. Maybe next year we'll get him on the boogie board.

And Boogie Boarding was Dallin's new favorite experience this year. He did quite well and enjoyed it until he started swallowing too much water.

Elaine and Dallin had fun in the surf with Daddy. Kirt spent quite a bit of time playing on the boogie board. I even ventured out a couple of times with my bulging belly--a little trickier, but not impossible and such fun!

It wouldn't be a day at the beach without a sandcastle. The kids didn't do this alone. Aaron Kahle was the main architect, but they all enjoyed 'helping' in some small way. We really had a fun group of kids and adults to play with on this trip.

Camping

And here they all are. We had six families, Us, Watts, Fishbecks, Petersens, Guffeys, and Wilkes(Lori-sister) with 24 kids total. We camped and played together for a week and all got a long with little drama. (We even had some other families from our ward who we hung out with on the beach, but camped at a neighboring campsite.) It was nice to have such neat friends to hang out with--thanks for planning it all Lori!

Here is a shot of our tent trailer, Brigham is at the door. It was definitely a nice upgrade from a tent. And another shot of our mini-tent city we created with all the families. We could see the ocean from our campground (and I even saw a skunk one night--eew). It was great getting the kids to bed and then chatting with the adults around the campfire. Not to mention some yummy dutch oven cobblers and s'mores enjoyed around that campfire, too.

Whale Watching Trip

We took a day with just our family to see some sites other than the beach. We went Whale/Dolphin watching on a boat out to sea for a few hours. It was an exciting little adventure.

We got very close with the dolphins. 'Schools' of them would just swim and splash around the boat, if the railing wasn't so high we could've petted them.

Here's some shots of the multitude of them just swimming around. It was neat to see the baby dolphins swim next to their moms underwater. Unfortunately, we didn't see any whales this trip.

At times the boat got going pretty fast making things quite choppy. All the boys ended up inside with a bit of seasickness. Elaine seemed unaffected and just loved watching the dolphins play.

Going Home

All good things must come to an end. Here we are all packed up and ready to head home. The drive was a bit longer towing a trailer and then made even longer as 50 miles from home we got stuck in a dust storm for over an hour. There was zero visibility at times. I had to wash off everything on the trailer when we returned. But, yes it was worth it for all the good times we had, not to mention cooler temps Ü Looking forward to going again next year!