Our Spring "Micro Trips" This Year
Executive summary: My son got two weeks off school this spring, so we took “micro trips” to Monterey and Paso Robles. The partial babysitting from grandma was a big plus too!
I said in my traveling with (young) kids post that we now take “micro trips” that are short in time and/or distance (see it here). As the kids get older, the hope is that we’ll be able to expand both our trip radius and duration. For now, though, 3 hours is as far as we’ll drive in a day with a 1.5yo and 5yo in the car. We have a routine worked out where we drive 45-60 minutes initially, stop for lunch, then little sis takes a nap in the car for the remaining 2+ hours while big bro has “quiet time” (but he often dozes off for a bit too). It’s even simpler with shorter drives — we cut out the first 45-60 minutes and hit the road straight after lunch. With that radius as a constraint, we didn’t do anything particularly exciting this spring, but we did take advantage of the two weeks of school my son got off, one in February (they call it a “mid-winter break”) and one in April (traditional spring break). We went to Monterey for a couple of days for the former and Paso Robles for 1.5 weeks for the latter.
First, Monterey. We were gone for literally 48 hours, so it definitely qualified as a “micro trip.” I just wanted to do something different for a couple of days, and held my breath that no one would be sick and cause us to cancel the trip. Luckily, it worked out by a hair and we spent two days enjoying the beautiful view of the ocean from our room at the iconic Monterey Plaza Hotel, spotting otters and other marine denizens swimming by. We of course took the kids to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, although they are still too young to appreciate it fully. My 5yo was more interested in the digital displays than the actual animals, and my 1yo ignored everything but the escalators, which we took her up and down on in endless loops. We did acquire a stuffed otter to further my daughter’s vocabulary — she started to say ahhh daaa, so we got the otter to help the word stick … TBD on whether that $20 was worth it (especially as we found out afterwards that male otters can be abusive, necrophiliac, serial killing rapists, hiding behind a façade of cute whiskery faces). We didn’t have time on the kids’ schedule to do the 17-Mile Drive or explore farther — we instead found ourselves at Dennis the Menace playground. Such is our travel these days. But all in all, it was a very nice micro trip that I’m glad we took.
Monterey and our hotel were lovely.
Next, Paso Robles. My MIL moved to PR last fall, which is right at the edge of our 3-hour radius, so we decided to visit her for spring break. Their winery scene has really taken off, so it sounded nice to be able to do a little wine tasting while we’re in town, provided that we could employ grandma’s babysitting services. Grandma is still wary of watching both kids together (they are the definition of chaos), so we ended up dropping by several vineyards for an hour during naptime most days, rushing out the door once little sis was asleep and scuttling back in right before she woke. It was fine — we still had a nice time and looked forward to our adults-only hour every day.
Reveling in an hour of peace and quiet without any kids in sight (or earshot).
As a Type A planner, I always had our trips mapped out to a tee, but since we’ve had to bring our kids along the last few years, we’ve played it by ear a lot more. My three criteria for picking wineries to visit were: (1) picturesque, (2) no reservations/advance planning required, (3) within a 20 minute drive of grandma’s. Ultimately, we visited more places than I’d originally planned, because it didn’t matter that we didn’t have reservations on the weekdays. We could always walk in mid-week in April, and there’s the option to get a glass of wine to sip at our leisure instead of doing a tasting if a winery was busy. Pear Valley, Sculpterra, Villa San Juliette, and Calcareous were all pretty. DAOU had the best views from being high on a hill, but beware the lofty prices to match. We picked up bottles from Pear Valley (they have a Muscat Frizzante that is a gently fizzy dessert wine, sweet, but so so drinkable, like fruit juice — my favorite wine of the trip), Broken Earth (we like Cabernet Francs, which are difficult to find on their own, not mixed with other reds), Villa San Juliette (more Cab Franc, plus Sauvignon Blanc, the only white my husband will “drink without complaint”), and Calcareous (another bold red Malbec/Cab Franc blend). And to think that we only started drinking 10 years ago, as it’s practically part of the curriculum in a proper MBA program!
It rained at the beginning and end of our trip, but that gave us a week in between to enjoy the views with our wines.
We also tried a number of restaurants while in town; some of our favorites were Taste Craft Eatery, Fish Gaucho, Jeffry’s BBQ, Junction, and of course the Market Walk is always fun. There were many more restaurants that would’ve been nice to sample, but with our kids’ early mealtimes and picky palates (not to mention I ruled out anywhere too fancy so we wouldn’t be *that* family disturbing everyone), we couldn’t hit them all. Oh well, if my MIL stays in PR, we’ll visit again, and by then the kids will hopefully be old enough for her to babysit alone while hubby and I grab a bite at one of the restaurants we missed this time. For now, I’m just so glad we had a relaxing 1.5 weeks and got to disappear for an hour each day to go wine tasting. Thank you, grandma!