The Boardwalk

(My continuing summer 'field trip' series.)



We headed to visit the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. It was a very windy and overcast day but the beach was busy as it should be since it's summer.

We had a bunch of ride tickets left over from last year and Emily had some arcade tickets that she wanted to redeem. It was getting expensive to ride the bigger rides and the arcade was just as costly.

The Tsunami - they were the only ones on the ride!

But the kids really wanted to go to the arcade. It had a lot of games which needed a lot of tokens. Hannah received a total of 319 tickets from her $6 worth of tokens. Her last 4 tokens gave her 250 tickets from one special game.

The machine that counts the tickets..

All you do for this game was to push the big red button, a ball drops to land in a hole which are all assigned different ticket numbers. Hannah's ball landed in between the Hole 7 and Hole 250. And it just sat there. I tried to bang on the wall to have it drop but no go. A nice boy about Emily's age was waiting to play this game and he kindly banged onto the window for us and it dropped into the 250 hole!! What a nice guy!! Boy, did that machine spit out a ton of tickets! All 250 of them!!

She was so happy because all the things she wanted to trade her tickets for had high ticket prices. She eventually got a little battery-operated hamster, a bead kit, and some Twizzlers.

Emily got a total of 259 tickets and chose to purchase little goodies to put into her Operation Christmas Child Boxes. Then a nice couple gave me another 169 tickets because they didn't want to get anything from the prize booth. What a generous couple! And the kids were thrilled. But it took even longer for them to shop now.

I always felt that the most time spent in the arcade was at the prize booth. It's easy to play all those arcade games because each one lasts only a few seconds. But we could be standing at the prize booth for hours just looking for what they want to get but can't because they don't have enough tickets so they frantically decide (since we parents are telling them to hurry it up) on getting cheap and cheezey toys that will break or get lost from the time we leave the arcade to the car. But that's the part of the excitement of the arcade, I guess!!

Being the 'baseball' players the boys were, they each tried to hit 3 to get a prize. They really wanted the huge pikachu (the bottom yellow creature) but the most they could get down was 2 (by D.).

I have to say that I enjoy the variety of food here at the Boardwalk! They have hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos, burritos, pizzas, wraps, terayaki rice bowls, buffalo wings, smoked turkey drumsticks, salads and I could go on. That's not even mentioning all the desserts available too! I love the Texas donuts because they are huge. Almost the size of my little Z's face! But I passed on it.. I chose a chocolate dipped ice cream instead.

Emily loves the dip n' dots.

Check out this metal key chain maker below. I remember making many of these when I was little at the Flea Market many many years ago. I remember typing in my name and all sorts of personalized words for myself. (I don't remember the specific words though. It was too long ago.) I treasured those tags. But I guess one day I realized they weren't too important because I don't have them anymore. Have no idea where they went. But it brought back some fond childhood memories.