Our honeymoon in Europe left my husband and I full of a desire to continue exploring the world and having new adventures together. While we would love to skip off to Europe on a monthly basis, our current schedules do not allow for it so when we returned home we began searching for interesting weekend getaways from Los Angeles. We knew we wanted to push ourselves out of our comfort zone so we agreed that we should try camping rather than stay in a hotel. The only question left was where.
I came across Jalama State Beach while researching dog friendly campgrounds and was immediately struck by the amazing natural untouched beauty of the area. Located just sixty miles up the coast from Santa Barbara, Jalama Beach is situated on a jagged piece of coastline far from the main highways and busy beaches of the area. Beautiful beaches are a dime a dozen in Southern California, but ones this isolated are practically non-existent. A few Google image searches in and I was sold. I quickly reserved a camping spot thirty feet from the beach and we began preparing our overnight trip to the secluded paradise.
Now I should admit right here that neither my husband or I are big campers. I camped as a child and worked at summer camps during high school so had slept under my fair share of evergreen trees and starry night skies, but in case you couldn’t guess that was a long time ago. It had been even longer since my husband went camping. We knew we were going to be completely out of our element, especially since we would have Lola, who has definitely never been camping, in tow. But hey, bring on the adventure! We loaded up the car on a Saturday morning and set off up the coast.