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<\/p>\nIt all began with the simple thought, "why don’t I take the boys to Santa Cruz for the day. We can dip or toes in the ocean, and maybe I can meet up with a friend I have not seen since high school."<\/p>\n
The day started off just fine. Traffic was OK, and we were delighted to discover a totally unexpected view. Coming over a hill, heading into Benicia, through a light mist, we see a bunch of unique looking boats. ‘A’ was convinced they wre battleships, but I could not be certain. I promised him we’d look it up online when we got home. Well, he was right! These ships are a part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet. They are "mothballed" ships that can be activated if necessary. I could not get any pictures, so here is one I found:<\/p>\n
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It takes three hours to drive to Santa Cruz. About 20 minutes outside of Santa Cruz, I began to not feel all that great. When I pulled into Santa Cruz, I had full on flu symptoms. I was so sick! I knew I would be incpacitated for a while, so I checked us into a motel, the Bella Notte<\/a>, and spent the next five hours wishing I were dead. The boys were a little bummed that they could not play on the beach, but they got to watch alot of TV and eat delivery pizza, so it wasn’t all bad.<\/p>\n The next morning was overcast and cool, but I felt much better and wanted to explore with the boys a bit. My friend, Deana (lives in Santa Cruz), suggested a few places to check out. One was a surfer’s museum. We found out that there was going to be a surfing competition close to the museum, so that was where we headed first. Deana had suggested we check out Wilder Ranch State Park.<\/a> Unfortunately, they were closed as well. We then went to Natural Bridges State Park.<\/a> They have a grove of eucalyptus trees where monarch butterflies spend the winter. We walked the trail and saw the butterflies. Could not really get a good shot, the butterflies were too high, except for this one… It all began with the simple thought, "why don’t I take the boys to Santa Cruz for the day. We can dip or toes in the ocean, and maybe I can meet up with a friend I have not seen since high school." The day started off just fine. Traffic was OK, and we were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-743006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-fun"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.centerdeep2.com\/riverbendprep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThe Surfer’s Museum was closed on Wednesdays, but we took advantage of a photo op anyway…
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\nWhile waiting, someone was blowing these giant bubbles. The kids enjoyed chasing them down. There was a slight breeze and the bubbles gave them a good run for their money…
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\nWaiting for the competition to begin…
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\nWe soon learned that the competition had been moved to a different beach because there was not surf. It was too bad because there were all these vendors who had to break down their stands. People knew the name of the beach, but did not know where it was, so we went to plan ‘B’.<\/p>\n
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\nHeading home, I decided to surprise the kids with one more stop, the Jelly Belly Factory!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"