Beach and Baseball

Due to the overwhelming response I got from my last vacation post, I've decided to post again. You're welcome.


Beach day! After much debate and brainstorming we ended up at Huntington Beach for an ideal beach day.

The weather was perfect. We had temps of 95 or so degrees. Perfect for hanging in a bathing suit by the beach.

We did our usual and went straight to Zack’s beach rentals to get our beach gear. For those of you amateur beach-goers, here is a tip…The only thing you need to bring with you to the beach is sunscreen and a hat. The rest you can rent for cheap without hauling all the way from Utah.

Here is another tip. Don’t bring any food to the beach. The birds will come and eat it as soon as you take one step away from your towels. They are very aggressive and good at what they do. Just eat before you come or after you go. Totally not worth trying to eat, especially a whole meal at the beach, don’t do it.

We usually rent a big beach umbrella and buy some beach toys for around $5. My brothers rented some body boards. Next time we’ll rent beach towels too. We were suckers and hauled them all the way from Utah, never again though, ever again. Too much bulk and weight in the suitcase.


As we knew they would, the kids LOVED the beach. Especially Alyssa, but especially Sunny!

The frolicked and built castles and searched the shore for sea shells.

Sunny didn’t seem to mind the cold water, in fact, I think she welcomed it.


We love Huntington Beach. We love to watch the Surfers we love the shops close by and there is good cheap parking and plenty of sand for everyone.

Steve and I also have good memories from when we were dating. We spent many days during our courtship at Huntington Beach.


After the beach we headed out to the ball game. We planned to go to see the Angels play. Since our group was so large, we were able get group seating. We got 25 seats for super cheap. Since we were a group we were able to purchase a hat, hotdog and soda for only $5.

The kids loved having a hat and a hotdog at the ball park. It really made it feel special. The seats were lousy and we were pretty disconnected from the game, but it was fun to be in the stadium. Unfortunately we went straight from the beach to the ballpark, so we felt kinda gross. Both Steve and I are sort of clean freaks and find it hard to enjoy anything if our bodies are not perfectly clean. We would have made lousy pioneers.

Sunny and Brad bonded while at the game. She was very wiggly and screamy when Steve or I held her, but she spent about 45 minutes with Brad and sat very calmly for him. I guess Brad historically has a calming effect on children.

We saw the World Series Trophy. I guess they won it sometime recently, or not recently, I don’t know baseball.


Here we are outside the stadium.


Here are the Davies, doesn’t this picture look like a post card? I took it. I should do this for a living.
After the game we headed back to the hotel. Birds-eye it should have taken us about 30 seconds to get from the parking lot of the stadium to the parking lot of the hotel, but since this is Southern California and traffic is CRAZY, it took us about 45 minutes. Frustrating.

Once we got the hotel we cleaned ourselves (whew!) and headed back out to meet Skyler and Elise for an encore evening with them.

Again it should have taken us about 5 minutes to get to their house, but no, due to traffic and some navigation problems it took us nearly an hour. SO FRUSTRATING!

We packed them into our Sokol-sized mini-mini Van, the Mazda 5 and went to In-and-Out Burger. We enjoyed it. Alyssa and Skyler had quite a dialogue going. It was really fun to watch and hear all the things she was telling him and the food was delicious as always.

We went back to S and E’s house after and attempted to watch the Office with them. Alyssa and Sunny enjoyed exploring their house and chasing each other around their center island, playing fetch with a tennis ball and drawing pictures. We determined that we would never watch the Office again so long as the children were still awake. Too distracting. You need to really watch in order to catch all the nuances that make the Office worth watching.