We were scheduled to fly out of San Francisco Sunday at noon with friends Randy and Donna, but discovered about 10AM that our flight had been cancelled due to mechanical problems. So we booked it to the airport, hoping to get another flight out. Thanks to Randy making the 40 minute trek to park the car and meet us, the other three of us hopped out and got a sweet spot (fifth in line!) at the reservation counter. But alas, it didn't matter, as Midwest had no other open flights (direct or indirect) into KC on Sunday. Some other KC friends actually headed over to Southwest and booked tickets for $400 each that didn't even get them back into KC until midnight. We knew that wouldn't even get us back to Springfield until 4AM, so we opted to take the airline's offer of a hotel room and fly back on Monday.
Dave found a car on Hotwire for $34, and after a quick lunch at the hotel we set out for the day. We decided to head south on Highway 1 down to Santa Cruz, and eat dinner there that evening. As we headed down the coastline, we kept seeing all the beautiful beaches and I spotted a place and asked if everyone wanted to get out and walk on the beach. We parked the car, and started the walk down through the brush and bushes towards what looked to be a short distance to the beach. Here we are walking through the bushes.
As we got closer, we realized that the beach was still quite a ways down from where we were. Sure enough, we looked over the edge of the bank and it was a huge almost cliff of dirt between us and the beach! We back-tracked, and ran into some other people who had went down another way and they pointed us towards it.
The pipe with ropes attached is in that middle dark groove in the picture above, so you can see how steep it was. I didn't have the appropriate footwear for the trek down, obviously!
But the effort was worth it, once we got down to the beach; it was absolutely gorgeous!
After making our way back UP the hill, we stood at the top and watched the sun set over the ocean; what a beautiful and peaceful sight. Then we headed down the rest of the way to Santa Cruz and enjoyed dinner at a local pizza and pasta restaurant. It was a great day, and much better than waiting in the airport all day or taking 2-3 other flights to get back to Springfield at 4AM, and as we joked, it was one of the best parts of the trip and it was free!
After making it home Monday night we both had full days ahead of us Tuesday, since we were a day behind with work. But it was a wonderful four days in Sonoma Valley, and I hope we'll make time to plan another trip back in a few years.
