This was originally posted on 9/19/16.
Yesterday Camille and I were invited to join Linda Crews and kids on a day trip to Santa Cruz. Camille and Julia have been close friends since elementary school and Linda and I are close friends also. We had a great day. We smiled, we laughed and yes, we hunted Pokémon together. I knew there would be hard parts too, Patrick loved Santa Cruz.
When I got home I was very sad and I wanted to write but I felt a little guilty. This blog is so helpful to me but I don’t want it to hurt others. I didn’t want Linda to feel bad that I was sad. She is a good friend though so I knew she would probably understand but I just couldn’t do it.
This morning I woke up and Linda had added some pictures to Facebook and a little comment about missing Craig, who is on a business trip, and it brought it all into perspective for me. Of course it was okay for me to miss Patrick! Linda had a great day too but she still wished Craig could have been there to share it. I don’t want to go through life moping that he is not there every time I do something fun but I need to acknowledge that I do have those feelings. No matter how much fun I have he is still not here when I get back home.
There were memories all day. As we drove over the Pacheco pass I remembered the trip where the darn Ford Pinto broke down at the very top. We had to be towed back to Los Banos and we spent the night at the Cinderella motel. The tow truck driver dropped us off on the other side of 152 but that hotel had no rooms so we had to haul all of our stuff across the street. I’m sure Patrick did most of the hauling. We had planned to go camping with friends and I think we had two ice chests packed with “provisions”, mainly the kind to keep us hydrated. 😉The next day dad came and rescued us.
As we drove into Santa Cruz we passed the hill where Zio Carlo’s beach house was. We stayed there several times and it was always a fun trip. As we walked onto the boardwalk the train was leaving and I remembered the time we took that up into the foothills for the day. Camille rode the carousel and was able to throw a ring in the clown’s mouth. This would have made her dad proud and also brought back memories of the many summers he spent time there with his family.
There were also a few trips with the girls and I have pictures to help remember those. Our more recent vacations were spent in the Pismo and Cayucos areas so those will be harder trips for me. Especially since many of them were anniversary trips. Santa Cruz was a good first trip back to the beach and it will help prepare me for Thanksgiving in Pismo.
There are going to be good days and bad days and I just have to find a way to get through all of them. I hope that it will get easier. I know life will keep moving forward and that’s what I have to do also. But I’m not going to lie, it would be great to wake up and find that this was just a really intense nightmare. And I know most of you would agree. 🙂