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Northern California Roadtrip: Sacramento, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz
7/14/2015So this post is a little bit late considering Justin and I took this trip in March for spring break... Ooops! Better late than never! I love traveling so I really wanted to be able to document my travels on my blog. That was the intention of my "explore" part of my blog. Since I haven't been able to travel too much lately it has kind of turned into a lifestyle section of my blog. So here is my first travel document so far.
For spring break 2015 my boyfriend and I decided to take a short road trip through Northern California. We had so much fun and I thought I would show what we did and other fun things to do in the area that I wish we would have done! :) We just took a pretty short trip so there were a lot of things that we wanted to do but there just wasn't time for but that just means we will have plenty to do when we go back!
We started this road trip by traveling to Sacramento, CA. We chose to spend a couple days here because my boyfriend has a lot of family who lives there. I had never been so it was fun being able to explore a new city. We only spent one full day in each place we went to so we had to pack a bunch of stuff in a little bit of time.
The first stop in Sacramento was Old Town Sacramento. This was a really cute area of Sacramento. It was the as the title says the old town part. The historic buildings were really authentic and the shops were really fun to go through and look around. We spent a lot of time here and of course we spent a lot of time in the candy shops as well... :) Of course though I failed to get pictures of the actual Old Town which I am really disapointed about. We did however go down to the boat on the river and the train for some photo ops which was fun!
We shopped around for a while and ate lunch and then decided to embark on a new adventure. We wanted to go over the Tower Bride, and it was a rush.. haha just kidding. I am really afraid of bridges so it was weird that I even wanted to go over it but it was fun I guess, if you make it fun :)
After the thrill of driving over the bridge we decided to go check out downtown Sacramento and go hang out at McKinley Park. It was a really nice area to just sit and relax! One thing I loved most about it is all the palm trees. I am obsessed with palm trees. We definitely don't have any palm trees in Idaho.
We made one last stop in Sacramento before heading over to his Grandmas to hang out with some of his family. We had to visit Bakers Donuts and check out their ice cream filled donuts. These were SO good. We shared one and couldn't even finish it! It was huge and super sweet and I loved it! If you are ever in Sacramento you should stop by Bakers Donuts and try it!
The next day we drove down to visit San Francisco! I hadn't been there since I was little so I didn't remember anything from there and was really excited to explore. We definitely had an interesting experience in San Francisco to say the least but it was still very fun. Just warn anyone who wants to go here... Parking is INSANE. It is so expensive so if you were trying to safe money like we were it was a pain in the butt trying to find decently priced parking. We ended up paying $30 to park in a garage and then later we found a free parking lot... That was a downside to San Francisco but it wasn't the end of the world :) We parked near Pier 39 so that was our first stop! I loved the whole Pier area. It was so nice and there were tons of shops and places to eat.
Had to get a picture with Ghirardelli Square behind us, which I wish we would have actually gone to.
If you are ever in San Francisco I would recommend stopping by the Palace of Fine Arts. The architecture and area of this was gorgeous and it was really fun to walk through!
We also went to China Town because why not! It was a fun place to walk around and I got these Japanese fruit snack type things which were amazing!! I wish I bought a ton more because we went through them so fast!
These are the best candy! They were so so so good!
We also took a drive down Lombard street but unfortunately we couldn't find a good spot to park and take a picture!
Our last stop of our adventure was Santa Cruz! I loved Santa Cruz and I would love to go back. When we do go back I would love to go down to Carmel and Monteray Bay because it looks beautiful there! But Santa Cruz was a lot of fun!
We first went down to the boardwalk but unfortunately all the rides were closed because they were doing repairs or something. It was actually nice that a lot of things were closed because the beach was like empty, we pretty much had it all to ourselves!
See what I mean, it was almost completely empty of people!
there was this little hole in the rock that took you to another beach which was really pretty and fun to go to!
After some time on the beach we went to go get some food, we had a little snack for breakfast but not much so this was like a combined breakfast/lunch for us.
If you go to Santa Cruz you HAVE to go to Cafe Brazil. It was such a cute restaurant and they had the BEST Acai Bowls. They were soo so good and have since become my obsession.
We ate this down at the beach and then continued to hang out on the boardwalk and we also walked down to the pier.
The Sea Lions were everywhere underneath the pier!
After spending most of the day at the boardwalk, I really wanted to go to Natural Bridges State Beach. This beach was gorgeous and I'm really glad we decided to go to it!
We hiked back on the rocks and found this awesome place on like the backside of the natural bridges state beach. If you are looking at the rock formation of the "bridge" then this place where these photos were taken was off to the right!
Sorry for the long post, but I take a lot of pictures! Hope you enjoyed and I can't wait to share more travel posts soon! :)
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