Point Reyes National Seashore
We decided since we didn’t have family to spend the holidays with that we might as well put our new trailer to good use and go explore CA some. We decided to go up to Petaluma, which is about 45 mins north of San Francisco and spend a week visiting the surrounding areas. They were all on our bucket list and they didn’t disappoint.
We stayed at the Petaluma KOA and it was a really nice campground. We extended our stay by a day and had to move sites the last day, but we still loved it. So much for the kids to do. For most of our stay we were right by the park, so the kids would go over every morning before we headed out and played for a bit.
This part of CA reminded us SO much of Ireland!! I couldn’t believe it! From the green rolling hills to the waterways to the sheep everywhere – it was beautiful!
The pictures below really reminded me of our visit to Killarney National Park in Ireland. (FYI – the Ireland pictures are editted, these ones aren’t. That was back when I had time to edit…) But they were both beautiful.
We headed to Point Reyes National Seashore and didn’t realize that it was quite as big as it is! It took 45 mins of driving to get from the visitors center to the lighthouse on the point. The drive was pretty though and there are around 10-15 farms that rent land from the park so you drove right through the middle of a few of them. There were so many deer we lost count. Apparently they have no natural preditors in the park anymore so they just multiple like crazy! They were everywhere!
There was one little town on the way out to the lighthouse with 2 places to eat. We chose Vladimir’s, which is an authentic Czech restaurant. It reminded us SO much of a little restaurant we ate at in Czesky Crumlov about 6 years ago. The food was good, if you like Czech food. (I don’t really, and it was pretty expensive, but the owners were very nice and the atmosphere brought us back to our time in the Czech Republic.)
The shoreline was beautiful. The pictures really don’t do it justice. It was a little bit windy but not TOO cold. They said they’d seen a pod of 50 whales off the point the day before. That would have been really neat to see. Maybe next time.
Traveling with kids is always exciting. We’re still getting the hang of being outnumbered, but luckily we can still just strap Jamison on so we only have to chase after two. It’s not too hard to keep track of them since you can pretty much always hear them…
Abbie begged and begged to go all the way down to the lighthouse, but after watching every person come back up out of breath and panting I said no. I didn’t want to have to carry all 3 of them back up the stairs. We compromised and went down to the first little platform a little ways down.
Next we went to Elephant Seal Beach. There were about 50 elephant seals on the beach when we went. You could hear them making noises and some of them were playing in the water. They said in the spring there would be over 500 seals on the beach. I thought they said it was all males right now, but there were a few babies, so I don’t think that’s right.
Lastly we checked out North Beach. I don’t know what these plants are on the beach, but they are beautiful. Shades of red, orange, yellow and green – they were so pretty!!
It was a great first day in Northern CA. Northern CA feels like a different world from our part of CA. We agree that if we could live in northern CA, we’d consider staying in CA. Unfortunately we’d need to win the lottery or something to do that.
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