I’m not a huge fan of this season. If it wasn’t for Christmas, I don’t think I would be able to survive between the months of November and March. In Oregon, it rains too much to do anything fun outside. In other places I’ve lived, it’s ice spaced out by muddy thaws. Although I’ve had some fun adventures in the winter months, I always prefer warmer weather for my travels. Lately I’ve been dreaming of warm places, like Hawaii, Mexico, and Southern California. Then I recalled the last time I was in Southern California, back in June 2011…
Just sit right back and I’ll tell my tale, my tale of a fateful trip…
Okay, we did take a boat tour, and although it wasn’t three hours, we did see one of the locations where Gilligan’s Island was filmed!
Most of that trip consisted of going around the harbor by Newport Beach and looking at the super-expensive homes of the rich and famous. We only saw one location that was inhabited by the non-uber-wealthy, and it was a buoy full of sea lions:
But most places looked like the picture below. We didn’t stay in a place nearly as fancy, but we were fortunate to spend nearly two weeks in a beautiful home in Newport Beach that my aunt and uncle live in. They were in Sweden for my cousin’s wedding, so we got to house-sit for them!
I had realized that it had been a long time since we had gone to Disneyland. The last time we went as a family, California Adventure hadn’t even been built yet! I thought it would be neat to go and see everything we had missed over the years, so I secretly began making plans to pay for my entire family to go to Disneyland. When I looked up the admission prices, I realized that I couldn’t even afford to take just me and my sister! I began looking at other options. Then I remembered Knott’s Berry Farm, which I barely recalled since I only went there as a toddler. My mom ended up not going, but I got to take my dad and sister into this amusement park all for the cost it would have been for just one of us to go to Disneyland!
Of course, because we were staying at Newport Beach, we spent a lot of time at the beach. We rented a surfboard one day, and after my sister got a little bit of practice with it, I went out for my very first surf session. But no sooner did I get out in the ocean did a lifeguard call everyone out of the water due to too harsh of waves!
But there were plenty of boogie boards at the house we were staying at, so I went boogie boarding just about every day.
We did quite a few other things, too. One day we visited my grandparents, and another day I participated in the International Surf Day’s beach cleanup. We did a lot of shopping and fairly healthy eating, and we did some sand sculpting…
And another thing we did pretty much every day was ride beach cruisers. Newport Beach has a great bike trail that goes along the shoreline. Sometimes we would just ride to the nearest beach, and other times we would go further to different shops. Some days it was hard to ride because we were going quite a few miles in the direction opposite of the wind, so we definitely kept in shape!
Because we kept in such great shape, treats at the Balboa Pier were not only guilt-free, but they were mandatory! 
Jessica Lippe 