It didn’t take the kids or us long to adjust to the time difference and come the second nights sleep everyone went to bed at a reasonable time and also woke up at a pretty decent time. So with some sleep on board, we set off for our first day exploring.
The day before I found this useful website Plan A Day Out – Things To Do With Kids In Orange County and it became my holy grail throughout our holiday. It had so many suggestions of what we could do in the local area especially as it was Easter weekend; Easter eggs hunts was happening everywhere!
We decided on going to the Easter Egg hunt at the Etnies Skate Park as it sounded like lots of fun as well as a cool place to explore. Slightly too late for the egg hunt itself, we enjoyed watching as all the kids descended on to the skate park to collect the eggs.
We made the most of the bouncy castles and activities area while it was so quiet. I just adore these photos of Charlotte in her new Lilly & Sid dress!
This burger. Oh man, this burger! It set the pretext for our holiday food. To this day, it is the yummiest burger we have ever consumed!
Parking the car that morning we learnt some more about America’s road rules – don’t park on the red kerb! Yeah, quite obvious right? Checking with a local we were told that we would get a ticket, and they kindly moved their car forward so we could move away from the red kerb. Here’s our fantastic hire car, we miss our Toyota Runner just as much as we miss California! We had to upgrade our car with Hertz when we arrived at LAX and realised our luggage and two strollers would not fit in the boot of our original car.
Hertz were fantastic with us upon returning the car; they saw we had three kids in the back and all our luggage and offered to drive us to the airport and save us the hassle of sorting out the kids, prams, luggage and the joys of shuttle buses. They even wavered the fee this would usually cost, two tired parents appreciated this more than they could imagine!
Our afternoon we decided to spend at the beach, and we headed off to Newport Beach. Now we totally forgot it was Saturday and that they may be lots of traffic. Traffic itself wasn’t too bad but trying to find parking around Newport Beach was impossible, so we headed off to the Balboa Pier area where we did find parking.
Naturally, all that sandcastle building and wave jumping was hungry work, so we headed up onto the pier towards Ruby’s for some chilli fries and coke floats – yum! Oli was so excited to spot a Sea Lion on our way back down the pier!
This view on the way back to the hotel topped off our day, we just drove along this stretch of road with mouths wide open.
That evening we grabbed ourselves a smores kit and headed to the firepit which pretty much completed our first blissful Saturday in California.
