Santa Cruz Anniversary Trip - Day 1

Yea Poppi! He has courageously agreed to keep the boys overnight so we can have a little anniversary trip. To his credit, he would prefer our get-away be several nights so he could have the hooligans all to himself. Alas, one night is all we could really do.

After Zachary's soccer game, and lunch, and a quick run to the store for fruit and diapers, and packing, and writing out instructions, we FINALLY left the house around 4pm. Yikes. A bit of a late start, but no big deal. We headed down to Santa Cruz, about 45 minutes away, for our get-away. Thank you google maps on my iphone for such easy to follow directions to our super-cheesy, super-cheap Knights Inn. Note to self and others...if you are planning on doing a get-away over Saint Patrick's Day weekend, perhaps you should make reservations a bit more than 3 days in advance. Sheesh. Everything was either booked, or well over $150/n. But not our sweet Knight's Inn (a bit sketchy yes, but we've had worse - Sangre de Christo Inn for one). We literally got the last room available. We shared the Inn with a baseball team, and a volleyball team. Good thing I packed my earplugs!

We dumped our stuff and headed to the 2ish blocks to the boardwalk. we have seen it twice now on our trips to Santa Cruz, but never gone to it. We knew that they were going to close in about an hour, or our little trip was more for recon for the summer. That said, who could resist a little bumper cars before recon mission??


Here we are both preparing to knock each other plus a bunch of other innocents around as much as possible. Super fun. A bit expensive to do the rides a la cart, with each ride costing $4-$6/ea, or a day pass for about $30. Defin go for the day pass. Then walking up and down the boardwalk, somehow being able to avoid buying all the yummy smelling boardwalk food! We also had to stop a bit for a cash game ($2) of bazooka. A cool hydraulic gun that shoots tennis balls 163 miles per hour. pretty cool


Then over to see if we can see just a few sea lions...not all the way down the pier, but just a bit to the first pier outcrop. Alas, no sea lions there, and not worth the effort to walk down the entire pier. Sad yes. we are already jaded. :)

Back to the Inn to change clothes (gotten SO cold as the sun set) and get some dinner. YUMMY pizza on across the street from the beach! We each got a personal size pizza which was really too much. Perhaps bc we also had a glass of wine each AND an appetizer of french fries. No judging, it's our anniversary celebration, we can gain weight if we want to (sung to the tune of It's My Party). Still, I had some leftovers....which....as we were walking back to the room, a homeless man offered me $1 in change for my leftovers. Of course I gave them to him for free, which made me wish I had not had that last piece which was really too too much.

Another anniversary tradition since our 4th anniversary is to watch a terrible movie ON TV, no phone/computer/ipad/dvd etc. Just whatever happens to be on when we are ready for it. We have had some hilarious movies in the past. We generally go for whatever is on BET, but are flexible. When we were in Brugge Belgium (she types snobbily), we had to watch whatever movie was in English. This year, not so so lucky with Dreamgirls on BET. Tradition is tradition. As we were FINALLY done with the movie (it wasn't bad, just over so so late!), our baseball team started their little get together. I believe my thoughts went like this "oh great...I hope I have my earplug, sheesh, I'll never get to sleeeeee......snore snore snore". Sadly, we had to set an alarm b/c we had to be at the boat at 10:15am for our Whale Watching Cruise. Very excting!!