Surfin USA

Since coming to America for ten years I always seem to discover something or somewhere that makes me realise why I make this long trip over to the US every year. This year it was Laguna with it's surrounding beaches. This place is truly beautiful. Surrounded by the affluent Laguna Hills this place was a gem of a find. It's about 30 miles south from Anaheim on the Pacific Coast Highway and our plan for the day was to explore some more of the West Coasts famous beaches. We started at Huntingdon (which we've visited before) which claims to be Surf City (although I hear that they are currently in dispute with another beach in Califonia who also aspire to this name) and had a coffee and danish there. From here we set off on the Pacific Coast Highway on a voyage of discovery :)! After passing many wonderful beaches we decided to take a look at the Crystal Cove State Park which we'd seen advertised on the info. channel in the hotel. After the noise and crowds of the previous day in Disneyland this was a very well anticipated place of contrast. We walked about four miles along this quiet, clean, uncrowded beach to the actual cove. There are many birds here (including the Anna Hummingbird which is beautiful) and many rockpools containing mussels, anenomes, barnacles and other crustaceans.

We walked all the way to the Crystal Cove itself which has the most amazing kind of ghost town of old fishing shacks. This was the most relaxing couple of hours.

Then onto Laguna itself - what a town!! There has to be a lot of money here. The cars, the houses, the shops!! We saw a Shelby and Roush Mustang within about twenty minutes and Porsche's here are two a penny (it's considered a status symbol here to have a European import especially German cars).

We managed to find a BJ''s Restaurant on the main road overlooking the ocean. The food was incredible for a Pizza and Grill chain. I have honestly never tasted such amazing meat sauce with pasta. Alan was made up because they had decent beer but as with all beers in the US its far too cold but the Porter was very good. We waddled away an hour later trying to do more walking but gave up and staggerd back to the car - we did about ten miles again today. Then in the car off to Dana Point and the Marina which is also beautiful but by then we were completely beached out - headed back to Anaheim for a well earned beer!!!

One final thing I must mention about Laguna is this sweet shop we found called the Candy Shack on Broadway. To take a child in there would be akin to child abuse. The air smelt of sugar, there are barrel upon barrel full of different flavours of salt water taffy and the rest of the shop is a tribute to true english sweets and chocolate bars - everything from Fishermans Friends to Double Decker bars - YUM!! Only a picture can truly portray how amazing this shop is.