Camping @ Carpinteria Beach

It's a tradition of ours to go beach camping every summer, this year we went to Carpinteria State Beach (its just south of Santa Barbara and its where Shane's family always camped when he was a kid). It's one of our favorites because it has great tide pools and gentle waves for boogie boarding. We drove up Thursday and stayed until late Saturday night.

It's always more fun to camp with friends, so we invited the Walters (Jacob, Jessica, Kaden & Reagen). The kids loved going through the tide pools. The tide was really high the whole weekend, but we still found some great stuff.
We always find tons of sea stars.

Serenity found a big sea snail.

We saw the biggest crab ever and lots of small ones. Jessica (Walters) found one inside a mussel and gave it to Jared, it jumped out onto his shirt. Then Jared gave it to Kaden and it crawled up his arms, onto his shirt and up to his neck.

Jared found a few jellyfish.

Morning #1 hair-dos. Look close at Jared's hair, it was perfectly spiked. I was surprised that he did his hair, later I found out he had used Rock Hard Gel the day before (that stuff really holds!)


Shane and Jared playing catch.

Of course we spent lots of time boogie boarding.

Serenity's Big Wipeout

Serenity & Jared

This was Jake's 1st trip to the beach (Jared's 1st trip to the beach was at Carpinteria too and they were both the same age!)

I love to eat roasted marshmallows; the kids love roasting marshmallows (well...it's actually more like catching them on fire). They ended up roasting ALOT more than they ate.

Morning #2 - hair-dos

Jake & Jessica on the trail to the Seal Sanctuary

We saw a heron catching fish.

Jake LOVED his wash tub bath.

The kids found our little gopher friend entertaining.