Ventura beach and Harbor Village

Stop four on our road trip was the Ventura beach and Harbor Village. The beach was very cold and given I like heat more than cold, we decided to walk along the beach facing the sun to see if that would help. 

It did to a limited extent.. Hope that my Vitamin D blood test due next week will pass with flying colors after all the sun we got last week.

The waves were tall and rough and there were not that many people around at noon.

we saw these baby Plowers on the beach.. they were moving so fast and well camouflaged in the sands and shadows.. it took me a lot of clicks to get this little guy. 

Then from nowhere this eagle comes down and takes some of these birds! Amazing how nature works!

 The kids had fun running around and climbing the little dunes. 

Then we went to the Channel Island visitor center. We have always wanted to go to Channel Islands park, but they require a lot of planning as the boat tours get booked months in advance. This time we stayed within walking distance of the starting point, but again, same result. No tours available. 

The visitor center is much hyped in the Ventura city website, but it did not live up to that hype. Compared to other visitor centers we have seen in National parks, this one is "okay". 

We proceeded to go to the Harbor Village. This was the real deal! Had lunch at a nice Italian place called Milano's. The food was great! After lunch we walked around the Harbor and took pictures.. the kids went on a paddle boat ride for an hour and that gave us a nice break for a high tea!

This family portrait was taken outside Milano's. 

They had the entire walkway nicely decorated with these lamps. We watched two guys patiently change the decoration for each lamp from Christmas greeting to New Year greeting. 

The paddle boat ride was starting to be a disaster. We watched another family struggle to even get out of the narrow path. The kids somehow managed to navigate through, and once they were out, they had a great time. 

They were very tired after the one hour paddling in the sun. 

 We stopped by for some last minute pictures in front of the murals on the way out. 

and it was time to say bye to Ventura and head towards Anaheim, as we had a date with Mickey the next morning! 

All of us loved the Harbor Village. It is a quieter less cluttered version of Sausalito and the people were sooo nice! Maybe it was the holiday spirit. Maybe the people in the Ventura harbor village are nice by default. Either way, we loved it!

They say it is 5 PM somewhere, for me it is 9 AM somewhere! So the blog takes a break! 

We pick up at stop 5.. later!

Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

At first we were wondering if we will go see a museum because we were driving through a very residential neighborhood. Then, as promised by google maps, at the end of a normal looking residential street, was this cute museum!

There was a large whale skeleton that greeted us ...

The museum was a single story school looking building with different rooms allocated to different things. It was target to really young kids (aged <10 in our opinion) to introduce them to science concepts. They had a nice microscope which projected the images on a 52 inch TV. The kids just stayed put there and viewed rocks, snail sheels, anything and everything and watched the images. We had fun at that exhibit as well..

Here is Jr. after focussing on some grainy rock

They had one room dedicated to space and space related items.. the thing that caught our eye in this room was this meteor.

There was a large exhibit about archaeology and excavations that focussed on two things. The pygmy mammoth, which I did not know anything about till this trip, especially that they were found in this area 12,000 years ago, and the Indian tribes of the area that were opressed by the settlers. 

The kids were not happy after listening to how the natives were treated and are still feeling the after effects of those days.

The little one seemed to know all about it already because she had read this book about  a girl who had survived alone on the Channel island for 18 years in a book that was part of her school read! The conversation started and ended with "Appa, you don't know anything!". If there is one thing I actually do know by now, it is that I don't know anything. 

There was a beautiful cheat sheet, in case there is a time scale quiz! 

They had a cute Christmas tree with butterflies as ornaments. We loved it!

We spent less than 2 hours here, but the kids had a good time. There were smiles all around, a few new things learned and information tucked away for future use. 

This reminded us of the Kids discovery museum in Sausalito. 

It is indoors and the kids feel nice and warm and have fun doing science work! The exhibits are very nicely done and the explanations are very simple.

The staff was also very friendly and helpful and guided the kids through various activities. 

This place was small but made our day!

Strongly recommended, if you have kids under 10. This is a great place to visit in Santa Barbara.

Pismo beach - a short stop

Our road trip to round off 2015 had its first stop at Pismo beach. We had lunch at the pier and let the kids play in the beach and in the swing sets on the beach!

At first they were complaining about the "cold", but warmed up to the place. 

The beach was beautiful but the temperature at noon was a lot lower than what we were used to seeing along the coast for last week of December. 

The last time we stopped at Pismo beach was 10 years ago! 

after spending an hour there, we moved on towards Santa Barbara...