Sunday in glorious Santa Monica. Well, glorious in that the weather could not have been more perfect. High 20’s, sunshine, no clouds… perfect! But in terms of being a great place to hang, it is pretty sweet but not somewhere I feel the need to come back to just to hang out.

To be fair we hadn’t spent too much time exploring, really just wandering around the main shopping and bar area. So today, before we departed for Anaheim, we decided to wander the beach in true Cali style. And what better place to start than on the world famous Santa Monica pier.

The pier is your typically touristy carnival type affair. Sideshows, rollercoaster, games of skill and chance, people trying to hawk off all kinds of wares. Being Sunday it was nice and busy, and so were rubbing shoulders with tourists and some locals I imagine as we made our way down. On the way, I mentioned “skeeball” to Kate who had no idea what I was talking about, so when we came across it of course I had to show of my prowess in the classic ball tossing game. Prowess? OK, I really don’t have any. I earned a measly 4 tickets for my efforts.

On the way out Kate came across Zoltar, but we really couldn’t be bothered finding out fortunes… things were pretty good as far as we were concerned. So we made our way down to the end and made our way back. Feeling a bit peckish, we stopped off for some tacos. Even likely dodgy pier tacos were pretty tasty… California Mexican food is pretty good.

Venice Beach was only a couple of miles away so we decided to walk along the beachfront down to there. I had visited 20 years ago, and had distinct memories of it being slightly dodgy and full of t-shirt vendors. We would see. The walk was nice and it was interesting to see how in just a couple of miles the vibe changed a little. Santa Monica is reasonably upmarket, and Venice is a bit more hippyish and you could definitely tell along the walk… there was a clear point at which we felt we had arrived at Venice Beach. While plenty of it is probably faux-hippy and skater, it had a more interesting vibe to it.

Oh, and A LOT of t-shirt stores still exist! Nothing much there had changed. In fact it still did feel quite similar to what I remembered.

With an ice cream under our belt, we thought it best to actually go and drip our toes in the water. The beaches were MASSIVE! I can’t recall seeing so much sand before. The water itself… it was quite nice but it wasn’t exactly the warmest! Not really too tempted to have a dip. What I was tempted to do was run along the beach Hasslehoff style. Seeing the lifeguard shacks on the beach was kinda cool. We even saw some lifeguards spring into action right in front of us! Thankfully no one seemed in real peril.

It was getting time to make the walk back, getting nice and roasted by the sun. But it was pretty great to just be walking along the beach and soaking up the California sunshine. Back to the hotel it was to grab our bags, then to catch a shuttle down to Anaheim, our home for the next 6 days. Yep, Disneyland awaited.