Warming Up to a Family Holiday in Santa Cruz : For the eager adults, a beachfront condo was instant paradise. The kids were a tougher sell.

On the first full day of our Santa Cruz County vacation, my 4-year-old daughter, Sylvie, awoke with an announcement: “I hate the beach.”

My heart sank. We had booked the last week in August at Manresa State Beach, counting on our children to love every minute of it. Aside from the obvious attractions of sand and surf, the great thing about this beach is that it is crowd-free, without traffic, and has miles of room for kids to wander without parents losing sight of them.

Sitting in the hamlet of La Selva, 14 miles south of the city of Santa Cruz, our condo’s foundations were pilings sunk into the sand. From its every window, we looked out on Monterey Bay, and the crashing surf provided a 24-hour soundtrack.

And Sylvie hated the beach.

My family was sharing the three-story, three-bedroom, two-bath accommodations with Chris Bateman and Suzy Hopkins, close friends whose two children--Ben and Hallie, ages 3 and 2--are nearly the same ages as our Sylvie and Rosa (4 and 18 months). While there are disadvantages to vacationing with friends, the advantages in our case far outweighed them. The most obvious one was financial--our lodgings cost $965 for the week, making the per-night cost per family only $67.

At that price, this was not resort living. Our condo was one in a string of nearly identical-looking structures, looming side-by-side above the beach, all with oceanside picture windows. There was no maid service, and we had to bring our own sheets and towels. The condo itself had its funky side--the towel rack on our shower door, for example, was affixed at one end with rubber bands and a golf tee.

More advantages of the shared vacation are companionship and baby-sitting trade-offs. After the kids were in bed each evening, we played Trivial Pursuit, Therapy and Scrabble. By swapping child-care, each couple gained one night and one day free.

Not that we had expected to need breaks from our kids. Great Mother Ocean was supposed to be the baby-sitter. We would spend our time reading novels or jogging.

Except Sylvie hated the beach.

To accommodate her, and the sense of touristic duty that soon seized us adults, we mapped a week of entertainment.

Santa Cruz, with its combination of quiet sandy beaches and cultivated farmland, evokes in me nostalgic images of childhood trips to Santa Barbara, or even Orange County. Add to the landscape the well-forested coastal mountains, and you have within a few miles all the spectacular scenery for which California is famous.

To avoid crowds, we chose Monday for our trip to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The morning sparkled with sunshine, so that the candy-colored attractions shone to best advantage. My tolerance for amusement parks is almost limitless, and this seemed to me the ideal amusement park: ocean views, clean, with fresh-faced carnies who are probably college students.

Also, there is no admission charge, so an adult who doesn’t need to demonstrate machismo by riding the Giant Dipper Roller Coaster (a National Historic Landmark) or recapture his youth by trying for the brass ring on the merry-go-round (also designated a historic landmark) can enjoy himself for free.

Of course, the kids were not there to sightsee or absorb ambience. They wanted thrills. For $15.95 each, we bought Ben and Sylvie, the older ones, bracelets good for unlimited rides that day. There were no lines, and the two kids instantly made good our investment. They must have ridden the helicopters alone a dozen times.

For the two toddlers, whose tolerance for anything diminishes as nap time approaches, we bought a strip of 50 tickets for $19.95, and they shared it.

Much as I liked the Boardwalk, we took an even more successful day trip Wednesday, to Dennis the Menace playground, part of El Estero Park on Del Monte Avenue at Camino del Estero in the town of Monterey, about 30 miles south of the condo. A friend who grew up in nearby Carmel tipped me off, saying visits there are among her fondest childhood memories.

We had taken the 35-minute drive down Highway 1 to Monterey in the first palce to visit the much vaunted multimillion-dollar aquarium. The hoopla is justified, but this was a classic case of proud parents overestimating the genius of their children. A toddler’s interest in a kelp forest, even a kelp forest containing sharks, just isn’t that high--particularly when he or she must view the kelp forest through a thicket of adult legs.

Anyway, 90 minutes of chasing kids around the aquarium convinced us that we needed a place for them to run unfettered, and the playground provided it. Filled with distinctive free-form pieces of play equipment--slides, a maze, rock caves, an authentic steam engine and a gigantic revolving contraption that must give the city’s insurance carrier heart failure--the playground afforded two happy hours. Said my husband as we prepared to leave, “This place makes you feel like a chump for ever spending money on rides.”

My husband’s birthday fell midweek, and we took advantage of the built-in baby-sitting to take a morning walk longer than kids will tolerate. During the 10 minutes it took us to drive to The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park in Aptos, just a few miles northeast of our condo off California 1, we speculated about the origins of the name. Russell thought Nisene Marks probably referred to some Stone Age drawings found within--you know, Holocene, Pleistocene, Nisene. . . .

Turns out Nisene Marks was a Danish immigrant who made good farming and bought up forest land that had been clear-cut in the 19th Century in order to preserve it for the future. We had intended to visit the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which lies about a mile and a half from the trail head, but we took a wrong turn and instead circled it on the rail beds of old logging trains.

The forest was peculiarly quiet; bird song heralded us just twice. Cresting a steep portion of the trail, I happened to look down and see a luminous yellow streak among the dull leaves. It was a banana slug, mascot of the University of California at Santa Cruz, wonderful in its strange brilliance.

On Friday, Chris, Russell, Ben and Sylvie drove north up State 1, and then northeast on California 9, for a trip on the historic narrow-gauge railroad in the mountains near Felton--north of the UC Santa Cruz campus. From Roaring Camp, an “old timey” collection of snack stands and souvenir shops, the trains depart every couple of hours, May through October, for a six-mile, 75-minute round trip through the redwood forest.

My own experience of the journey was limited to the video replay, but Russell reported that the open-air cars gave a terrific view of the “gorgeous, sunlit forest.” Meanwhile, the kids were quite taken with snow cones and souvenir slugs of type from an old Linotype machine.

To my way of thinking, a vacation is a departure from the everyday, and that includes everyday food. Though we made uncounted trips to the supermarket 15 minutes away in Watsonville, we never seemed to have anything to eat except mayonnaise and slightly used apples--ones the kids had bitten and discarded. So we ate pizza, tacos from an authentic-looking taqueria in downtown Watsonville, and lots of turkey sandwiches from a chain deli called Togo’s.

The kids happily ate hot dogs for dinner three nights in a row.

Food and miscellaneous supplies (toilet paper, trash bags) for eight for the week ran us about $225. That doesn’t include eating at restaurants, which we did three nights. Our family’s restaurant costs, including a festive birthday dinner at The Veranda at the Bayside Hotel in Aptos, came to about $150.

Somewhere in all this, we did find time for the clean, wide beach, and if Sylvie was unimpressed, we grown-ups were enthralled. We live well inland back home, and everything from the swirling fog and surfers at 6 a.m. to pink sunsets and shimmering moonlight delighted us. Barbecuing on the deck one evening, we spotted five bay porpoises swimming south, just at the line where the surf broke. Occasionally, one would catch a wave, and we watched its silhouette plow beachward in the translucent water, backlighted by the fading sun.

Compared to the busy beaches of Southern California, Manresa State Beach was almost deserted. I don’t require absolute isolation in a beach, and I did not begrudge patches of mine to the few clusters of people usually within eyeshot. In fact, I welcomed the family that included 6-year-old Christina. Sylvie glommed onto her, and became much more enthusiastic about the beach.

In the end, with help from Christina, my idyllic image of happy kids came true. Sort of. For minutes at a time, long enough for me to read a page of my novel, Sylvie would deck her sand castle with broken sand dollars and Rosa would gather tangles of kelp and gull feathers. Later, the three of us might wade into the surf, or, while the dads watched the kids, Suzy and I would play a lazy game of Smashball.

Of course, Sylvie soon would announce that she needed to use the bathroom and Rosa would demand a glass of milk, so then we’d bundle everything up and return to the condo.

One day we flew kites and one night we roasted marshmallows over a campfire. I like to think Sylvie will remember that.

Would we do it again? We plan to make it an annual event. Next year, I will look into a slightly more upscale condo, and we’ll probably skip the aquarium. In fact, we grown-ups decided we’d like to spend more time at the beach.

I haven’t consulted Sylvie yet.