Santa Cruz

We spent the first weekend after returning from our trip changing up all of the bedrooms. The boys had been grumbling off and on about wanting separate rooms (Ezra) or not (Finn), and we were trying to solve a space issue in our small house. We decided in lieu of separating them, we’d give them the bigger room (the one we were in), move the office stuff into their old room, and take the room we’d been using as an office/family room as our bedroom. It was a lengthy process, but my favorite part was separating their bunk bed, which took a bit of planning.

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Finally they had their new room with more floor space and a little under-the-bed play/reading area.

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The next weekend we didn’t do anything — or rather, I didn’t do anything. I had laser eye surgery (PRK) on my right eye on Thursday and spent the weekend recovering.

Finally, on Sunday, August 9th we had a weekend outing. We went to Santa Cruz to check out the boardwalk. It was a beautiful day and we had a nice walk from where we parked along the shore to get to the boardwalk.

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I have to say, sadly, I did not enjoy the boardwalk. It was incredibly crowded, hot, and expensive. We finally found a little arcade and the boys got their fill of video games. This motorcycle game was definitely a hit.

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After the boardwalk we found a so-so pizza place for dinner and then started walking back to near where we had parked because we’d heard on Sunday evenings they have a bunch of people who gather to do fire dancing. These two cool cats were pretty cooperative, even though they hate stopping to take pictures.

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The scenery was lovely.

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When we reached the lighthouse it was starting to get cold, but not yet dark and there were just a bunch of people hanging around. Finally some people started to break out the fire. The boys were totally enthralled.

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Even that activity died down a bit, so we waited some more and I took more photos of the sunset.

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Finally more performers came around and it was really fun to watch. Here’s a video.