Betabel RV Park in San Juan Bautista, CA

We chose this location because it was in between Monterey and San Francisco.  We will stay a week in San Francisco three weeks from now but we needed to be close for our one day to visit the Museum of Ice cream and for our flights to Hawaii. We enjoyed watching the cows roam on the hill outside our widow all day long.

The California Coast 

We spent a day driving from the Monterey Peninsula, through Big Sur, all the way down to Julie Pfeiffer Burns Sate park. It one of those things you must do in your lifetime! Even though it was foggy it was magnificent. We whale watched, saw a sunset and just spent the day together as a family- what can be better than that?

Carmel is located on the southern curve of the Monterey Peninsula, this is where we started our drive. Pictured below is the Carmel Mission, Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, number 14 on the California Mission Trail. It was founded in 1770. We are trying to visit several of them along our travels through the state. There are 21 total missions on the El Camino Real.

The other mission near us was right off our exit in San Juan Bautista, number 15.

There are a couple of state parks along coastal California. Our National Parks pass does not work on California State Parks so we only drove into one and paid the day use fee of $8. Plus the $3 we had to pay for the map- yeah those aren’t free either. You can buy an annual State park pass but it is expensive (like everything in California) and we weren’t going to need it again. In Northern California, the Redwood Parks are protected by the state and national parks so our NP pass will work up there. We chose Point Lobos State Park at the beginning of our drive, near Carmel, off the coast of the Monterey Peninsula. You can park on the street at the park near the end of our drive, with the waterfall, but be sure your tires are not touching the white line- a $75 mistake on my part:(

I have been looking forward to finding and seeing for my own eyes, the waterfall on the beach. Yes, a waterfall on the beach! I once saw a picture of this waterfall flowing onto a beach into the Pacific Ocean in a magazine. I cut it out and it was the first picture I put in my travel scrapbook (we each made a travel scrapbook before we set off on this adventure so we could express to each other what we wanted to get out of this adventure).

Check out the iMovie I made and uploaded to youtube about our day trip along the coast.

The road after Julie Pfeiffer Burns State park was closed so we were not able to drive to San Simeon to see the Hearst Castle.

 

Trip to San Francisco for the Museum of Ice Cream

For Christmas we gave the girls tickets to see The Museum of Ice Cream exhibit in San Francisco. They had seen this on a youtube video and really wanted to go. It is a traveling pop art exhibit and luckily it was going to be on the west coast around the same time we were so I decided to buy them as a surprise gift. There were so excited on Christmas morning, even though they had to wait two months.

It was only going to be there for a few weeks so we rearranged our travel plans and made it to San Francisco for our reserved ticket date. That’s the beauty of this lifestyle, it’s so flexible!

It was only an hour drive up to San Francisco for our 3pm ticket time. Afterward we ate on Macy’s roof top at The Cheesecake Factory for dinner.

Check out the iMovie I made and uploaded to youtube about our day trip to San Francisco to visit the Museum of Ice Cream.

We celebrated Valentine’s Day here. We received a fun package- Thank you Grandma Francey! The girls loved all their goodies!

Thank you sweet Bennett Family, for the cute Valentine Card. Andrea said she knew the girls would miss out on exchanging Valentine’s for the first time so she wanted they have a surprise Valentine. 🙂