Pacific
Grove and Point Lobos
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, more frequently when the older children were younger and accompanied
us more regularly, 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. A typical Sunday
afternoon would include the parents window-shopping and café-ing in Carmel, and the
children rock-scrambling in Pacific Grove.
The negative on the left has suffered a bit (all of the negatives in this roll have been
through the wars) but these first photos were taken in December
1997 during Nick
and Tom's first visit to us in California (see here). 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!
They spent most of their time jumping on and off this "island", as it
was more and more surrounded by the rising tide.
Here are other pictures taken at the same spot, one of Daphné
and one of Tom.
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.
These flowers on the left were growing just above the rocky shore and the surf.
Here are the walkers, except for Marie-Hélène,
who took the shot.
And here again is the inevitable rock scrambling, which still evokes as much
excitement as it did years ago when they first discovered it. Alex is down at
the 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.
