How to travel with children: California for 3 weeks
In the next issue of our heroines' travel column, the story of Katya Stavitskaya, one of the creators of the parent blog Mamacita Urbanita and Stavitskytravel.com, about San Francisco, a winery in Napa Valley, Yosemite National Park and breathtaking views from Highway No. 1.
Why did we come up with it
When we just got married, Oleg was sent on his first business trip to California for a full four weeks. We didn’t have children yet, and while I yearned in February Kaliningrad, Oleg sent me enthusiastic SMS and his photos in a T-shirt. Then for another four weeks he talked about the beaches of Santa Monica, huge portions in American restaurants, about the endless and even streets of Los Angeles and wine from Napa Valley. All this impressed me, but the tickets were too expensive, California - too far, and we decided to forget about it for a while. We only returned to talking about this trip a few years later, when we already had two children, Oleg's brother studied in Canada for a cameraman, and Oleg sent himself on business trips.
Preparing for the trip
We had a pretty ambitious plan: first drive through San Francisco, Napa Valley, Yosemite National Park, and then go along Highway No. 1, enjoying ocean views, towards Los Angeles and Santa Monica, where you can bask in the sun for five days . When planning the route, we, of course, thought about the children. Kira at that time was eight months old, and she didn’t care where she was taken, but three-year-old Sasha already had her desires. For example, we knew that Sasha would not want to live in a national park for a week and climb waterfalls every day, as we would like. And we, in turn, did not want to spend the entire vacation on the playground in San Francisco. Therefore, we are looking for compromises. When we decided on the route, we began to look for a hotel. After the European choice and European prices for hotels, it was very difficult to get used to the American ones: they are mostly networked, rather boring and expensive. Conversely, there are a lot of classy apartments in San Francisco, and for little money. But if you are planning a trip in August, you need to book at least three months in advance. With car rental, everything was simpler: we have a Hertz discount card, so we booked with them. As in any other rental, you can choose the class of the car, and what exactly will give - you will know on the spot. But the main thing is that in America almost all cars default to automatic machines, which is a plus for me: in Europe, you have to pay extra for an automatic machine.
1-8 day
San Francisco
San Francisco was hot and we all really wanted to sleep. For some reason I thought that we could avoid the jet-lag (because we are such cool guys), but it was not there. For the first three days, we fell asleep, squatting on any surface, and the children jumped up at three in the morning and demanded that the designer be assembled. With children, the jet-lag is more difficult: they cannot be persuaded to stay awake all day in order to quickly reorganize, so we simply suffered until everything settles itself.
Our Bed & Breakfast, as it turned out, was in the gay gay area of Castro, and in general it turned out to be a gay B & B! I booked him in such a tantrum that I didn’t even pay attention to the description ("the best gay friends of B & B in San Francisco"). With tolerance in our family, everything is in order, but it was rather strange: a family with two children and a grandmother among cheerful gay men who in the evening dumped out of the sauna in terry bathrobes in bundles.
San Francisco is the hills from which you can see the ocean, yachts and houses. The light is everywhere turquoise and blue, the wind is blowing, and the houses are all different and colored. It was interesting to walk around the city and imagine what it is like to live here. We immediately went to the park and were fascinated by the local playgrounds. Any parent from Russia would weep there, leaning against the soft cover and swing for babies. One of the sites in Dolores Park was built together with young artists and designers: all designs looked like installations from the Museum of Modern Art, only on these installations you could jump and jump.
In addition to the sites, we went to the Zeum Children's Museum: we thought we were going for the sake of the children, but in the end we could not get out of it for several hours. In Zeum, you can stick together a cartoon from scrap materials, make a clip, dress up in costumes, build a giant padlock of soft blocks, play an iPad embedded in an amanita, and of course make something out of paper and plasticine in a creative laboratory.
In San Francisco, we were joined by our Canadian buddy Gosh. Gosh loves to eat, like us, so he had a useful Zagat application installed on his phone - this is a famous restaurant rating in America that you can trust, so we no longer had questions about how to find a good place for dinner or breakfast.
Of course, we climbed onto the Golden Gate Bridge: to be honest, a car ride on it is much more impressive than a postcard view from the shore. We went to downtown, where I saw America like the movies: skyscrapers, taxis, traffic jams and shops, shops, shops of all those brands that usually have to be ordered via the Internet.
California is an American center for a healthy lifestyle: yoga, organic, locale. And since Americans generally do everything on a grand scale, they have taken the consumption of organic products to the extreme: what is only one supermarket for Whole Foods with organic cosmetics departments, ten kinds of organic potatoes, pastes from all kinds of nuts that put pressure on you and vegan cooking. In general, if you want to buy something, there is everything in America. And this sometimes knocked me off the true purpose of our journey.
My favorite area of San Francisco is Haight Street. The “Summer of Love” began here, all the hippie and organic movement of America went from here (two friends broke a bed in the nearby Golden Gate Park and began selling their salads to the locals), Harvey Milk's headquarters was stationed here. Of course, now this is the Disneyland version of the hippie movement: retired mummers walk along caramel graffiti and American Apparel stores. But if you turn from the main street into some alleys, it turns out that there is the highest concentration of stores with plates, benches with any pathological specialization (for example, a giant store of board games), as well as the most giant store Amoeba Music (everything is sold here: from " The X-Files "on VHS to exotic jazz vinyl).
9 day
Napa Valley
Once we got out of San Francisco by car to Napa Valley, to the Parraduxx winery. This is a great winery that we love for several reasons. First, they make amazing red blends: mainly cabernet sauvignon, zinfandel and merlot interfere. For their branded Z- and M- Blend, which in Whole Foods go for $ 25 a bottle (this is the starting price for a good wine in California), you can sell a soul. We call Paraduxx a “duck” because they have outstanding label design: everywhere there are all kinds of waterfowl, from ducks to migratory geese. Thirdly, Paraduxx makes bottles of a sparing volume of 0.375 ml, and, having successfully entered the winery, you can arrange an improvised tasting of the entire line. The Paraduxx winery is an absolutely heavenly place: the wine is served in the shade of huge trees, where you save yourself from the scorching sun, bring it with several glasses of flight, about each detail, but not tiringly tell, serve a light snack. You leave from there, filled with universal love and "Zinfandel". We have subscribed to the Paraduxx Facebook page, and they are now teasing us with announcements of tastings of new wines, presentations of new vintages and stories about gastronomic yacht tours that they organize for members of their club.
10-15 days
Yosemite National Park
After San Francisco, we went into nature, to Yosemite National Park. We rented a Dodge and by the evening were on the spot. Yosemite is not just a big park, it is gigantic, about the size of c half of California. Inside the park itself there are very few hotels, and for the summer they are all taken apart six months in advance, so we settled 20 km away, near the town of Oakhurst. Despite the fact that the shelves in the local supermarket were crammed with artichokes and organic salads, stout Mexicans walked the streets, eating breakfast at McDuck. It was not clear who even bought all these artichokes.
But the main thing is nature! Yosemite is the perfect place for hiking. Without children, we would gladly choose some wild route and go for a couple of days deep into the park, but with children we chose in advance several of the most famous and accessible points. Yosemite is an ideal place for lovers of landscapes: a forest, several large waterfalls, mountain streams, mountain peaks - everything can be viewed from above and below. The main thing - stock up in advance comfortable shoes for the whole family. Our first route (easy, as the guides claimed) in rag sneakers ended up with Sasha sobbing, looking at the rainbow in the mist of a giant waterfall. She was so tired that she didn’t care. And we just cut off the legs to the knees.
It is imperative to bring food to Yosemite with you: it is much more pleasant to have dinner, looking at squirrels and a mountain river, than to chew dry pizza at one of the few and mediocre restaurants in the park. There all possible natural experiences happened to us: we saw the Vernal Fall double waterfall and rainbow in its splashes, watched the sunset on the highest point of the Glacier Point park, walked around the giant sequoia in Mariposa Grove, but most of all we were impressed by Tenaya Lake. It is located in the very depths of the park, high in the mountains, so not many tourists decide on such a trip. The lake is completely smooth and transparent, and everything around, even the air, of some unusual milky-blue color. There is also a wild beach, where we finally felt ourselves in nature, and not on a tourist attraction. Around pine, white rocks and silence.
10-18 days
Highway №1
After Yosemite, we returned to San Francisco, where we met Brother Oleg, who had flown in from Canada. We drove in the direction of Los Angeles along highway No. 1, the most picturesque highway of the West Coast: such beauties appeared around the corner that we threw everything and ran away to be photographed. Sometimes wrapped on the beaches, for example at Pfeiffer Beach. On the way to Los Angeles, we spent the night first in the resort town of Carmel, and then - not far from Santa Barbara in a network hotel by the road. Carmel - this is American dreams about Europe: small houses "antique", funny French restaurants and shops with expensive questionable art. But not far there is another city - Monterey, where the best aquarium and aquarium, which we have seen. In addition to all possible fish in the world, waves, waterfalls and friendly stingrays, there was a huge hall with beautiful jellyfish, and several more interactive rooms for children: in one of them, for example, you could draw your jellyfish on a huge screen and put it into animated swimming.
18 day
Santa Monica and Los Angeles
We arrived in Santa Monica in the evening, on the way we stopped in Malibu, where we first saw girls with makeup and swimsuits at the same time. In Santa Monica with a dress code, everything turned out to be serious: if you could run in sneakers and shorts in the morning, then at dinner in the restaurant everyone changed into dresses and shirts, even tourists (in Europe, tourists dine in the same sneakers, which climb the mountains). In Santa Monica, everything is so relaxed and easy that you yourself become a little airy after a while. There we rented apartments 200 meters from the beach and did almost nothing: we ate, slept, went to swim and sunbathe on the beach. We hardly saw any Los Angeles, but I have no regrets: in big and harsh cities it is very difficult with children.
We were at the Getty Center and Observatory: two hours stood in merciless traffic jams and arrived at the very closing. The door to the telescope slammed right in front of our nose, but we still saw Los Angeles at night from a great height. It cost all the traffic jams: wherever you look, you could only see lights, there were so many of them that they even moved like ripples on the water, and all sorts of banality about a little ant-man in a teeming ant hill immediately climbed into his head. It was the last American impression, the next day we flew off to a repeated jet lag.
In California, everything is completely different, but at the same time comfortable and cozy, you feel that you ended up in a movie: all landscapes are familiar from American films. And most importantly - many opportunities. You can choose any leisure option: sit in diamonds in expensive restaurants in Napa and taste wines, climb boots in the mountains in Yosemite, drink in cheerful bars in the Castro and Mishn areas of San Francisco, spend all the money on shopping in Santa Monica, walk to museums or sunbathing on the beach. We were very sorry that we went to California in August: the highest prices, all the cool places were booked for a long time and not by us, and there are many tourists everywhere, even in the forest. Recall only Yosemite: traffic jams and parking for hundreds of cars inside the park, where it is impossible to find free space. It is difficult in such an environment to merge with nature. We regretted that we had so little time, only three weeks, and we did not have time to drink some more wine in Napa, to see the Mendocino coast with cliffs and views of the ocean and Mono Lake with salt columns. I regretted not taking lipstick or earrings with me for publication. And so, honestly, there’s nothing to regret about: this is one of my best trips.