Carpinteria, CA
September 25–28, 2015
I am sharing highlights from a family road trip we took one year ago to honor our toddler son Atticus, whom we had lost to cancer. We didn’t post about the trip on social media at the time, but we honor him in the telling as well.
After an amazing time in Disneyland, we spent a day at Nana’s house in San Diego to recover and pack up the van for our next stop, visiting my cousins on the central coast.
That meant driving… though [expletive] Los Angeles.
Google maps will outright lie to you about how long that drive will take ;-)
It took a couple hours longer than we had anticipated, but we did eventually make it through LA, past Ventura and into the beautiful little beach town of Carpinteria, CA.
This visit was so life-giving. The town itself is as charming and beautiful as can be, and so are my cousins. They had made the cutest fairy garden in the backyard for the girls…
They treat our kids like gold. Our oldest got to do some sewing projects with her cousin (and pen pal)…
And they showed us all around this lovely town.
I had mentioned in an earlier post that we had registered the kids as homeschooled. Well, we brought a lot of materials with us, and this was the first time on the trip that we really busted them out and worked through them.
You would think we were torturing them by keeping them from all the fun just out of reach for those couple hours each day, but they did it. Sometimes at the library, sometimes around the kitchen counter, we’d go through reading, math, science, etc. and they’d ask how much longer. :)
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Finish this and we can go to the beach! Now THAT was a great day.
It was an absolutely amazing time.
I had one of the first iconic moments of the trip — watching my cousins pull the girls around the water on their body boards and everybody smiling and laughing… it was exactly what I needed.
I hadn’t been doubting, but that moment made me feel like we had definitely made the right decision to do this trip.
We actually did TWO days at the beach… and that can wear you out.
So we enjoyed some downtime at the house too — under the shade of a MASSIVE avocado tree.
(sorry, no avocado photos available, because I ate them all)
They also insisted on watching the kids for a night so we could have a date night in Santa Barbara. Saints, I tell you!
The final evening of our stay with them, we ate at the Padaro Beach Grill.
Another perfect moment of a beautiful family in a beautiful setting, eating great food and loving on each other.
I get emotional looking back at all these images because my cousins were (and ARE) so generous with their time and their home and their lives. No one knows what to say to us to make things better. And that’s because there is nothing you can say. They didn’t try. These amazing people and their love and their sheer presence was absolutely life-giving for us in our darkest hour. I am forever grateful to them and love them.
It was a great week together, but our trip was just getting started.
