This was taken during Nick and Tom’s first visit to us in Santa Cruz in December 1997. Daphné, Tom and Alban were scrambling on the Pacific Grove rocks while Nick slept off his jet-lag in the car. The rock scramblers were having a blast!
We have the good fortune to live about ten minutes from the Pacific Ocean in Santa Cruz, which is at the North end of Monterey Bay on a lovely piece of California coastline.
One of the places that we drove to on Sunday afternoons when the older children were younger is the Monterey Peninsula at the South end of the Bay. It is home of Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” (the world’s best portrait in words of a party), the charming village of Carmel, where Clint Eastwood was Mayor for a time, Point Lobos State Park and the rocky headlands of Pacific Grove.
More fun and frolics on the rocks! They spent most of their time jumping on and off this “island”, as it was more and more frequently surrounded by the rising tide.
Our typical Sunday afternoon would include the parents window-shopping and café-ing in Carmel, and the children rock scrambling in Pacific Grove.
These early negatives have suffered a bit (all of the negatives in this roll have been through the wars), but there are other neat pictures taken at the same spot during this lovely family day out, one of Daphné and one of Tom.
The flowers were growing just above the rocky shore and the surf
Jumping forward to 2004, for a visit to Point Lobos State Park, a gorgeous slip of coast just south of the Monterey peninsula. We visited with an older and bigger Tom as well as Charlie and Alex, and with the new digital camera to avoid problems with negatives.
Below are the walkers, except for Marie-Hélène, who took the shot. The marked paths in the State Park make for safe and easy hiking.
By 2004, it was rare for one of the older children to accompany us on this kind of Sunday afternoon outing. Tom was 14 in this spring photo, and must have been bored at home that day for some reason.
And below again is the inevitable rock scrambling, which still evokes as much
excitement as it did years ago when the older children first discovered it.
The children may change over time, but some of their interests remain constant. Alex is down atthe bottom left, Tom on high, relatively speaking, and Charlie between the two.
Here are other Santa Cruz highlights: surfing, soccer, mountain biking, West
Cliff, swimming, more soccer, the Boardwalk and Happy Valley School.