Well, since weeklong vacations in Hawaii are out of the question right now, I decided that we still needed to do something to celebrate the official arrival of summer vacation. The husband was once again gone all week at yet another training school so I took advantage of the fact that I had set aside my birthday week to do something fun together. Last month I had made reservations for a one night stay at a resort in Marina called The Sanctuary Beach Resort. The plan was to spend two days and one night down in the Monterey area hanging out and having a bit of an adventure with my kiddos. My photographic challenge to myself was to only bring two FIXED lenses, my "el cheapo" 50mm f1.8 and my new 135mm f2.0. I don't care what anyone says about that particular 50mm being a super cheap lens, I'm always shocked at how fast and sharp it is. For under $100 you just cannot beat that lens. In fact, I used that lens for nearly all of the following images.
We spent the first day slowly making our way down to the resort and "killing time" at Target in Seaside while waiting for our room to be ready. Once the room was ready we jumped into our swimsuits and hit the pool! It was actually a fairly sunny day and we hung out at the pool a solid two hours. I left the camera in the room so I don't have any pictures of that (other than those taken on my Iphone!) but a good time was had by all :)
The resort is surprisingly kid friendly despite being considered a "luxury" hotel. It had a little kiddie toddler pool and a much larger pool with thte majority of it only about 4 feet deep and then a huge hot tub that literally overlooked the two pools so you could safely watch and monitor your kids from the comfort of the hot tub. Some woman was the genius behind that design, I'm quite certain of this.
Another perk to the resort was that cars are not allowed on the grounds so they assign you your own golf cart during the duration of your stay and you just zip around in that golf cart to get to the pool, the beach etc... I cannot even begin to tell you how many times the kids and I just went out to drive around on the golf carts during the 24 hrs we were there!! OMG, hilarious. We could have just done that the entire time we were there and the kids would have been on Cloud 9.
In order for us to be able to stay at the Sanctuary Beach Resort, I had to pack all of our meals for the 2 day trip which was really no different than packing for a camping trip, except without access to a stove. I think I managed really well and we saved a bunch of $ by avoiding having to eat out. The only outside food we got were a couple Starbucks runs which I would have done whether we were home or on a mini vacation!
After the pool, I fed the kids dinner in our room and had them all set up in their jammies when they asked to go check out the nearby beach. It was getting close to sunset and the fog was rolling in but I just threw their jackets over their P.J's and we all hopped in the golf cart for a little ride!
The path to the beach was GORGEOUS and the view once there was stunning. I sometimes forget just how lucky we are to live where we live.
Look at all the cute little bungalow type rooms at the resort!
My little OCD - sensory issues kids cannot handle sand in their sandals.... Sigh. Look at Gavin's face, you'd think he'd just stepped in poop or something.
Don't trip on that lower lip!
My challenge here was to meter for my shadow so that my shadow would be dark and the kids would be the secondary element. I wanted to showcase how annoying it is to have crazy curly hair on a windy day.
What good is staying at a hotel if you can't jump on the bed? We were practically out of light at this point so I was shooting at ISO 1600 and wide open at f1.8 with a SS of 1/500 to effectively stop the motion. Ellie just LOVES jumping on beds.
Gavin is much more tepid and cautious in his approach :)
Still 1600 ISO, all direct window light.
Then we read books and crawled into bed and I let them stay up with me and watch "So You Think You Can Dance" on TV. They are now officially hooked so I have to TIVO the rest of the season for them! HA!
The next morning it was cartoons in bed while I prepared breakfast.
Then they played a bit while I did dishes and cleaned up. It appears Gavin's lego obsession is slowly being replaced by a fascination with Bakugans. He even has Ellie schooled in all the "points" system and activation rules and powers and blah blah blah, oy vey!
And since I firmly believe that any good vacation should entail as much time as possible being spent in your pygamas we then headed down to the beach to play, while still in our jammies, until the pool was open for business. It was pretty cold and overcast but they didn't seem to mind. :)
I seriously cannot believe how tall that boy is sometimes. He towers over everyone his age.
Then we played in the pool until it was time to get ready for check out. We waved a very sad goodbye to our beloved resort on our last golf cart ride but then remembered that we were heading to the Monterey Bay Aquarium!! WooHoo! It was, as expected, totally PACKED even for a midweek visit being that it's summer an all. I only took a few pictures because it is hard enough to keep track of two highly mobile kids at that place let alone concentrate on trying to get good shots. Also, the distortion from the glass was annoying and hard to work with.
I wanted to get the whole circle in the frame but it was too crowded to allow me space to do that and I had a nanosecond before people were all up in my shot. But I got the spotted shark going by!
My absolute favorite sea life species are the Jellyfish and the Seahorses.
The goal with this next one was to get one shot with Ellie's face clear of fish and one shot with Gavin's face clear of fish and seeing as the darn fish were swimming in a tight group ridiculously fast it proved much harder to accomplish than I had anticipated!! But I got it! Yeah, baby!
After three hours they were fried.
So we got a Starbucks pick-me-up (coffee for me and honey yogurt with granola for them) and headed south down to Point Lobos for some tide pool exploring. We had never been there before and I was taken aback at just how absolutely beautiful that area is. Just WOW. We started out with some tide pool exploration but Gavin got totally freaked out by the pinchers on the crabs and insisted we vacate the area immediately. Can't say that I blame him entirely but Ellie kept wanting to get CLOSER to them. That kid....
So, we switched gears and proceeded to a hike to China Beach instead while still in the park.
Then we capped off the evening at Point Lobos State Park having a picnic dinner overlooking the view.
It wasn't a week in Hawaii but it was definitely the next best thing packed into two days of PURE JOY.
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* side note* I was finally able to post that video of Gavin riding his bike for the very first time and my mom running after him and filming it on her phone at the same time. SO FUNNY! I'm so glad she got it on film since I wasn't there to witness it myself and it was such an important event in his life. Go to the blog post two posts down and you'll find it if you are so inclined. :)
