One of the spectacular sunsets at Pajaro Dunes

A couple of weekends ago I stayed at a beach house in the gated community of Pajaro Dunes on the Monterey Bay coastline in California with a group of friends from high school. We had the time of our lives there!

The inside of the beach house was light and cheery. The color scheme inside was white, yellow, and light blue, and there were windows everywhere. A whimsical set of bare toes was designed into the hearth of the stone fireplace.

The front entrance to the beach house

The backside of the beach house looked out onto Monterey Bay

The cheery yellow, white, and light blue color scheme in the beach house

Can you see the bare toes on the hearth of the fireplace?

Pajaro Dunes is on the edge of Watsonville, a farming community where most of the artichokes, raspberries, strawberries, lettuce, and cabbage that we consume in the San Francisco Bay Area is grown. Even if you don’t live in the Bay Area, if you have any fruit or veggies in the house, it’s a good chance some of it was grown in Watsonville. For me, driving through the Pajaro Valley to get to the beach house was like taking a step back in time. There were miles upon miles of row crops and old trucks loaded with packaged berries leaving the farms to deliver fresh berries. In my younger days, the San Francisco South Bay and East Bay areas used to be large farming communities and most of that fertile ground is now covered with housing tracts, and the high tech businesses that make up the Silicon Valley. 

Miles of artichokes, lettuce, strawberries, cauliflower and other row crops line the bottom of the Pajaro Valley

Acres of raspberries are covered with tents

Sorry for the digression. The beach house was built on a small cliff above the beach. There were Adirondack chairs placed around a fire pit and that looked out onto the bay.  This is where we spent hours visiting, listening to the waves, and watching pods of dolphins and sea lions swim by. I was excited to see the dolphins as I have never seen them off the coast of California. I’ll tell you, there is nothing like an early morning of enjoying a great cup of coffee while watching dolphins swimming and frolicking in the surf.

I sat here and watched pods of dolphins and sea lions swim by

At night we made a bonfire in the fire pit and sat around the fire telling stories and laughing until we ran out of wood. We found sand dollars during our walks along the beach in the morning.  We ventured away from the beach house once to go up the coast to Capitola for lunch and to visit some of the little shops there.

There are condos and beach houses (including the one where we stayed) in Pajaro Dunes for rent.  Here is a link to the website where this particular beach house can be rented:  House 6 – At the Dunes Rentals

What a wonderful way to spend a weekend and to get a much needed attitude adjustment. And, only about an hour and a half from home!

~merry~