Day Trips from Dana Point to Malibu

This Tuesday is my Mom's 50th birthday, and my Dad secretly organized the "Five Days" of celebration for her. In other words, my whole family was told to completely clear our schedule from Friday to Tuesday. The plan was everyday we were going to surprise my mom with a new activity to celebrate her birthday.

Friday started with a beach bonfire at the Portuguese Bend Club complete with hot dogs, hamburgers, salad, and smores (lots and lots of smores).

Saturday, we went down to Dana Point to meet up with some of my mom's college friends at the Dana Point Harbor Beach. One of the families is obsessed with stand up paddle boarding and had about 6 boards and paddles, so they brought them all to the harbor.

Sadly there are no pictures, but I absolutely LOVE stand up paddle boarding. It was more of a core workout then arms (surprisingly) since the harbor water was completely still. With no waves or currents, learning to SUP was super easy. It wasn't hard to keep my balance, but then again I purposely chose one of the bigger boards that could have floated an elephant. I really want to try it again at the beach, so I'm going to look in to renting boards this summer. After the beach, we went to family friend's house for dinner.

Sunday, we drove up to Malibu to meet my grandparents at their friend's beach house. The place was beautiful and right on the water. I'm a tad of obsessed with beach side houses/condos (I kinda mentioned it during my post about the bike ride), so I took a few pictures of the house. It's small and cozy, but the location makes it crazyyyy expensive so we were all excited to have a chance to spend the day there.

main bedroom

second bedroom with terrible lighting in this picture

actual master bedroom turned living room (side with desk)

other side of living room

luckily it got sunny with the hour after we got there

We got to the house around 12, and decided to all go for a walk on the beach to get out our dog's energy and to take a peak at the other houses on the beach.

Spiral staircase to the beach from a neighboring home

We came back to the house, and had a really delicious lunch. Wendy is honestly one of the best cooks ever, and she always goes full out for any event. We had steak sandwiches, potato salad, roasted corn salad, and salad with strawberries, raspberries, dried cranberries, and pecans with a homemade raspberry vinaigrette dressing. Everything was delicious, but the actual salad was amazing. I usually find fruit to precious to put in veggies, but I totally forget how delicious the mix can be. To top it off, the whole meal was eaten on the balcony.

Lunch with a view

After lunch, we had a beach day and went swimming in the ocean and took a longer walk to the adjacent more public beach (the house was on a public beach too but didn't have public parking so it's pretty empty). Dogs were allowed on the beach so Roxy was having a better time than all of us and running around like a crazy person. She only slightly slowed down when she ran into the water and was hit by a wave--it took her a second or two to figure out how that happened.

We finished up the day with homemade birthday cupcakes. They were carrot cake with white chocolate  cream cheese frosting and had a mango gummy on top for fun. Oh, and they were delicious.

Day four of activities included a trip to the Getty Villa, but I need to grab a few pictures from my mom's camera in order to write about it. Actually I'm hoping to update this post too with a few pictures off my brother's camera too, but if I don't finally post tonight it won't happen.
Yay for hitting publish! Good night!