Oh Hi, Ojai (and Our Other Summer Trips This Year)
8/9/26
Executive summary: We kept the travel relatively close and easy this summer, and while it wasn’t exotic, it was still a much appreciated break from routine.
There was a period of seven years when it was very difficult for hubby and me to travel, due to a combination of kids and COVID. But we broke that streak last year by going to Spain in May and Switzerland in December, while arranging months in advance for the kids to stay with the grandparents. I had intended to keep up that cadence this year, but unexpectedly ended up really busy with buying/selling our home and moving (again) in the spring (see full post here). By the time the dust had settled, I was in no mood to plan another international trip for us, so I started considering closer destinations. We hadn’t visited grandma (my MIL) in Paso Robles since Thanksgiving, so we decided to drive there after school ended in June. For some much-needed adult time, we left the kids with her* for 48 hours while hubby and I dashed off for two nights in Ojai. Since our getaway would be so short, I went all out and booked us at the Ojai Valley Inn resort, on the chance that it might get quite hot in June and we’d want to just hole up on the property instead of running all about (and that did indeed happen)! We did spend a couple hours meandering around town one day, looking in the little shops and stopping for treats whenever it got too hot, but most of our time was spent lazing about the resort and eating whatever we felt like on whatever schedule we felt like … grandma explained our getaway to the kids as “your parents need time to be silly!” The resort did have plenty of kids running around (and ours would’ve enjoyed the huge grassy area), but my husband and I were united in thinking, “who are all these rich people who are willing to pay resort prices to stay here with their kids?” Haha
Eating and doing what we want, when we want, is the epitome of luxury to us post-kids. To think we used to take that for granted!
After our week in Paso Robles/Ojai, we brought grandma back with us to stay for another week. It was a bit of an intense “staycation,” as we took the kids to multiple activities every day (e.g., Bay cruise, museums, arts & crafts, movies), whew! Once the “staycation” had wrapped up, we spent six weeks on our summer cadence (see full post here), which included my 7yo going to camp 9-3 daily and my 3.5yo stuck to me like a burr as I cobbled together activities to keep us both entertained (e.g., music classes, “gymnastics,” swimming, playdates, visits to children’s museums, playgrounds, libraries, a lot of chocolate croissants at cafes, etc). At the end of six weeks, we geared up for an end-of-summer trip, this time flying to see my cousin who lives near Pomona. The kids get very excited about airports and airplanes, so a 1.5-hour flight is perfect for checking that box. This trip was a little different in that we left my 7yo to stay for the week at my cousin’s house, as he likes to play with her boys (1 and 4 years older than him). It’s our version of sleep-away camp, ha. Meanwhile, my husband and I took our 3.5yo to spend the week at the Hilton Waterfront resort in Huntington Beach an hour away, just across the street from the ocean. Only having one child to cater to made it feel much closer to a vacation, lol. It’s all relative, right? I actually got to sit down at the pool and at the beach for an hour a day while my daughter commanded dad to fetch buckets upon buckets of seawater to dump into the sand. (As an avid Peppa Pig viewer, she delighted in “jumping up and down in muddy puddles, splish splash splosh splish splash!”) We also checked out a bunch of kid-friendly places around Orange County, e.g., Discovery Cube, Pretend City, Balboa Fun Zone, Fashion Island, Irvine Spectrum Center, Huntington Beach pier.
Our room faced the perfect direction for watching the sun set over the ocean in the evenings.
We ended our SoCal visit by taking the kids on the train for the first time. My cousin suggested hopping on the Metrolink (like the Caltrain in the Bay Area) from a station near her home down to San Juan Capistrano, an hour-long ride. While the boys might delight in riding the train all day long, I figured my daughter would tire of it, so I had my husband drive down separately to meet us and fetch us back midday, haha. Our travel routine is to let the kids rest/nap in the car after lunch, so this arrangement worked out perfectly for our schedule. And I’m so glad I planned it this way, because the return train ended up being 45 minutes late, so the rest of my extended family (who wanted to take the train both ways) ended up waiting at the station for over an hour in the infernal heat. Public transportation in America isn’t that reliable, I’ve had lots of experience to say.
The mission at San Juan Capistrano was larger (and prettier) than expected!
While nothing wildly exciting happened this summer, I’m glad for our two intra-California trips in June and August. The kids had fun, we had a change of pace, and it was easy to plan after spending the spring dealing with a long list of house and moving stuff. I don’t have any far-flung plans for winter break either — just taking it easy travel-wise this year. But maybe next year, we’ll try for more adults-only international trips again. I’ve already asked the grandparents to block some dates on their calendars. =)
*Grandma always calls in her boyfriend for reinforcements when we leave the kids with her. As a result, the kids enjoyed Yori’s home-made hand-stirred gelato for two days in the name of experimentation/science. They pronounced it “the best ice cream ever!”