Since I was spending my birthday at home, my parents asked what I wanted to do for the occasion...so of course I chose the beach (again!) :) We had such a great time at the beach the week before, but I had REALLY wanted to see the tidepools in Pacifica with tons of starfish, so I stalked the tide calendar and the tide was supposed to cooperate early in the morning on the 14th. So, we planned a little overnight trip to the Bay Area.
The day would not have been complete without a decorated birthday chair, and even though I told her it wasn't necessary since we were leaving, my mom came through with a birthday chair and some gifts that morning.
Our first stop were the tiled steps in San Fran which I had also been wanting to see in person. Although I felt a little crazy driving to see a bunch of stairs, it did not disappoint! I loved them. We went to 2 different sets of steps and I think I preferred the Hidden Garden ones, mostly because there were far less people. The boys took their monster trucks and raced them down the gutter next to the stairs, so they had fun and didn't complain too much of me wanting to take pics of them sitting on stairs ;) haha.
Dylan slept through the Hidden Garden steps, but woke up in time to explore the 16th Ave tiled steps and succulent garden with us.
The 16th Ave steps had an ocean, land, sun, moon and stars theme which was pretty cool.
The succulent garden on the side of the steps was also rather impressive and beautiful, as were a bunch of the yards in the neighborhood where they were.
The view from the top of the steps.
And then went across the street and got McDonalds ice cream for dessert (it was my birthday so we had to celebrate...we learned some lessons about eating ice cream on the sand ;)
For the afternoon we spent some quality time at Montara State Beach which was simply beautiful. The temperature was perfect, we even played in the shallow water a bit and caught more sand crabs than I've ever seen. There were seriously like 50 crabs in each cup full of sand that we would scoop up. It was a little boys' dream come true!
Happy 35th birthday to me!
I got to play with the boys a bunch but also got to sit back and watch them play together which is one of my very favorite things
Take me back! I want another perfect afternoon there with my favorite people. It was great to spend so much time with my parents and kids, but we definitely missed Grant a lot!
That evening we stayed at the Embassy Suites. We hot tubbed for a bit and then ate thai food takeout before heading to bed to wake up super early for the tide pools!
Rowan's sunbeams teacher from San Diego had recently moved to Pacifica and had posted pics of a tide pool with at least 50 starfish, and since then I had been wanting to explore it. So, we woke up at 5:30am to head to the beach. We took a little nature walk along a trail out to the beach. Along the way we saw a few local walkers who told us there were no tide pools at that beach (which got me nervous but I knew that was the spot that Judy had said to go to and this was our only chance for low tide), so we continued on.
When we first got there I walked by some rocks and saw 2 starfish (Rowan spotted them first) and decided that it had already been worth the trip, but then we walked around a rock and it was amazing! There were countless starfish and anemones everywhere!
The kids got pretty cold so we didn't stay a terribly long time (and the tide was coming in). but we explored for 20 or 30 minutes and I had never seen anything like it! There were seriously probably close to 100 starfish in a very small area, so cool! I was grateful that everyone put up with my crazy requests for my birthday (stairs and super early morning tide pools :)
Then we headed back to the hotel for a yummy Embassy Suites breakfast and some swimming. It was a great end to an amazing birthday weekend!
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