South through California

October 2004

It has been a while since we updated everyone on our latest adventures so here is the latest news. As of our last message we were headed south from San Francisco to hit the Southern California area before Thanksgiving in Arizona. We spent the first days of our travels from San Fran on Highway 1 taking in all of the views and sights on our way to Santa Cruz. We spent a couple of nights at Sunset Beach S.P near Santa Cruz. One afternoon we headed into the town of Santa Cruz and played around at The Boardwalk (love the Giant Dipper!) and then picked up supplies. After Santa Cruz we went down the coast to Monterrey and spent and entire day at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. The Aquarium now has a huge “outer bay” tank which is home to schools of LARGE yellow fin tuna, sea turtles and the only Great White shark in captivity. Apparently the young shark is doing very well. One of our favorites was the jellyfish exhibit so we have some pictures for you to enjoy.

Moving south again on the 1 we spent the night in Big Sur at Pfeiffer State Park. The next morning we woke up early, made a big breakfast, then went for a hike to a viewpoint above the campground and then through the forest to some local waterfalls. We broke camp and headed down the coast to Pismo State Beach near San Louis Obispo. It is a great place where you can bog your vehicle down onto the beach and camp a few hundred yards from the ocean. At about 10 pm that night we got a call from Barb Waterkotte (Eric’s Mom) with news that Eric’s sister, Cheryl, had gone into labor and was really close to giving birth to her daughter. The next morning we called and found out that everything went well and that we had a new niece named Maura Claire O’Malley. After hearing the news, we decided that we should speed up our pace a bit in order to arrive in AZ ahead of Thanksgiving.

Before going to Arizona we had a few important stops to make. First, we spent a week in Bradbury, CA with our good friends Gina and Paul and their almost three-year old twins, Gabriel and Isabella Boghossian (and Vino, their dog, of course!). It was the week of Halloween so we got to see the kids in their Halloween costumes and share in some family partying. We didn’t have any plans for Halloween day so we decided to spend the day at Magic Mountain, which is only a half hour away from Bradbury. We spent the day, and most of the night, exploring the park and marveling at the engineering of all the new coasters. We were particularly blown away by X, Superman - The Escape and Sarah’s favorite, Goliath. Eric was in heaven riding all of the new coasters, especially since Magic Mountain ran most of the rides with no lights in celebration of Halloween.

After a great visit with the Boghossians we headed down to Dana Point for a couple of nights to see Sarah’s family and to celebrate Sarah’s step mom, Tina’s birthday. We caught a couple of surf sessions and fell in love with spending the warm days down at San Onofre. We were also able to meet up with our friends Jon and Ty, which was great. We were almost set to leave California, but decided that we wanted to stop by and see Eric’s Grandma in Yucaipa, CA for a couple of days. We had another wonderful visit with Grandma Waterkotte and were happily surprised when Denny and Mary, Eric’s Aunt and Uncle, stopped by on their way to Big Bear for the weekend. At this point, we were dying to see our new niece so we bolted straight for Phoenix.