Things I love: sunshine, tacos, the ocean, and great driving.

Things we experienced on our four day vacation across the California coast: all of the above.

This trip was originally planned so that we could visit Aaron’s family for Father’s Day, which we did and had a fantastic time doing. But after we booked the flights and reserved that Sunday for family, we decided that we were deserving of a bit of a treat vacation on either end of it. So one by one, we booked extra plans to really make it an escape: one night beachside in Cambria, two nights in Aptos within walking distance of the Cement Boat (or, at least, what’s left of it), and a bright red mustang to get us both of those places in between visiting friends and family in a very fun way.

May was a pretty garbage weather month here in Washington, so we were very much in need of sunshine. California, ever faithful, delivered. Aside from an atrocious hour spent in airport security last Saturday morning, we had four near-perfect days of road-tripping, hangouts, and laughter. We ate tacos and burritos and chips and salsa, we played mini-golf on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, we watched surfers catching overhead waves off of West Cliff. We saw elephant seals and moo cows and horses, all living their best lives, and countless rolling golden hillsides up and down the coast. After our night in Cambria, which I had never visited before, I left with a much fuller appreciation of why Aaron is so eager to return there – if I had spent my last year of college getting to do a daily run along Moonstone Beach, I too would measure every other place I lived against that almost unreachable standard.

What always strikes me about time spent in the sun is how blue it is. Sunshine, in my mind, is a bright and blazing yellow. When I try to illustrate it with words I reach for butter colors, bursts of citrusy lemon, maybe something akin to mustard if we’re talking sunshine in the fall. But in photographs, and in life, I really feel like sunshine turns out to be very blue. Sunshine is a cloudless azure sky, a rolling turqouise wave, cold clear splashes in a cobalt snowmelt river. And after the soggiest of Mays, we spent four days savoring an almost intoxicating amount of it, whether exploring Morro Bay at sunset, killing time and grabbing iced coffee in Morgan Hill, or driving up Highway 1 near Ragged Point with the windows down.

We are making a concerted effort to be better at things like taking vacation because, in a truly American turn, it is not something we excel at prioritizing. But a mere four days spent on the road together, surrounded by so much blue, was a wonderful reminder that even simple escapes can go a long way.