Summer Family Trips: A “Slice of Life.”

Hello Readers!

I believe an author’s blog should be about the author, not just promoting her books or sharing articles related to those novels. I’d like to share a few photos and snippets of family trips this past summer.

Keep in mind that “summer” lasts longer in California than many parts of the nation, so these trips really are recent!

Apart from the following featured road trips, my husband flew back to New England and he and our son went to Alaska, but I’ll save those for another blog post. This one is focused on summer adventures as a family.

My husband, son and I enjoyed fabulous trips around our gorgeous state: to Lake Tahoe, Donner Lake, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Big Sur, and many beautiful spots in between. Although we’ve been to all these places many times, we never bore of the beauty!

We are big skiers and with the recorded 700 inches of snow received in Northern California this past ski season, we once again skied Squaw Valley in the summer! This is in late June, with the scent of Coppertone, BBQs, fresh mountain air and sunshine blending in with the love and laughter.

During that trip, we stayed in one of our favorite campsites on Donner Lake called Donner Memorial State Park. We love the great outdoors, and camping goes well with skiing, be it on water or snow. We tend to do a few activities in a day: We’ll start off with a couple of hours of snow-skiing, then move onto paddleboarding, kayaking and whatever other water toys we can play with for a while. Hiking is also an avid activity or ours. Life is Good!

From there, we traveled down the coast to quaint, artsy San Luis Obispo. We stayed at the Days Inn. We also drove around many of the county beach towns surrounding it and camped on the sand at Morro Strand State Beach. Our son Ryan, who is now in his Junior year of High School, toured Cal Poly while in SLO. We enjoyed the farmers market at night, met up for dinner with a large group of friends and savored the incredibly pretty vintage shops and cafes around the area.

We love Big Sur and always stop to take in the surreal beauty around us. I feel so fortunate to be living in the breathtakingly charming state of California.

As many of you are aware, I am the protagonist, Caryssa Flynn, in my novels. Although highly fictionalized, the story is based around a woman who made the biggest trip of a lifetime twenty-five years go: On a one-way ticket to San Jose, California when her employer transferred her to work in Silicon Valley. And, although she never thought she’d stay on the west coast forever, here she is in the year 2019 and still here! Living in the moment, every beautiful moment of her life.

But this is simply a quick post about a couple of trips we took over the summer of 2019. I’ll save the story about “Caryssa Flynn” (me) for my next blog post! And I plan to add travel posts about trips to Paris, London, South of France, Monaco, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, back to New England, and many other adventures. Stay tuned if interested!