Monterey-Santa Cruz Trip
The Hurricane - Santa Cruz Boardwalk
Originally uploaded by AlexH/lumpyAgain, I planned on getting up early as possible, because Monday was Labor Day, and I wanted to stop in Santa Cruz on the way home, but I didn’t want to be caught in hellacious traffic. I figured 6 am was a reasonable time to start the day.. the sun’s up so I might as well be, too! Unfortunately, I had a bad headache and I wanted food and coffee. Nothing in town would be open that early, especially on the holiday, so I’d have to wait a whole hour and a half before I could get the free breakfast from the lobby! Oh my god, 7:30 am.. I might as well call in late to my job at that point! But, oh well.. I showered, dressed, watched the non-news on CNN, finally got my food, and bolted on to Highway 1. For those of you who don’t know/care, Rt 1 is the coastal highway that goes pretty much the length of California, and is supposed to be one of the most beautiful drives in the country. I always thought about doing the entire drive just for fun, but then whenever I get in my car, I remember that no matter how breathtaking the view is, any drive more than 20 minutes is simply not fun. I would rather just go see parts of it at different times while I’m still out here in Cali, and I figure once I’ve seen it all , it’s time to move back to the East Coast. There’s Santa Monica, San Diego, Big Sur.. can’t remember what else. I’ve been by Bodega Bay a couple of times, which is just as great.. I guess LA. I’m not sure I want to punish myself that much yet, but I’ll get to LA at some point. But anyway, it was like 45 minutes or so to Santa Cruz, and it was a nice drive.. not any traffic at all, and most of the scenery was farms that seemed to be growing lettuce and leafy greens. Other than that, there were a few twists and turns through rolling hills and some forests, but none of it was unpleasant.
I’m not sure what I was looking for in Santa Cruz, really. It’s a college town that’s on the coast, and I didn’t look up anything to see if any special events were going on there. Seeing as how I wanted to make it back home at a decent hour, I wasn’t planning on staying too long, so I just figured I’d wander around. I was expecting huge crowds of people, but hey, it was around 9ish or even before when I got into town, so the only people I saw when I got there were a bunch of Mexicans waiting for trucks. Well, it was Labor Day, after all! Ha! Kidding aside, it was almost like a ghost town at that hour. I read in the LP guide that in SC, it was All Pay Parking, All the Time, so I didn’t even try to look for a good spot, I just drove straight to the Boardwalk and into the $10 lot. It seemed like a big, expansive lot with nobody there, but a couple of hours later when I got back to my car, it was a zoo, so I was lucky to even get a spot. The boardwalk itself is a bunch of big, shiny colorful buildings with old timey roller coasters and rides right by a beach. There are arcades, deep-fried Twinkies, and crazy ass pirate ships. At that hour, nothing was really open, not even a place to get coffee, so after a short walk down to the ocean, I decided I’ll come back to it and walked back through the parking lot and over a hill, down some steps, across a river, and into the downtown Santa Cruz area. By this point, there were people out. Human interaction incident #2: There were a bunch of ratty looking white dudes walking down the street. Not the bearded homeless vet begging for change types, but the suburban runaway Haight Ashbury/Little 5 Points-I-Choose-to-Not-Bathe types, who are basically just a different brand of crazy. One of them came up and asked me if they could borrow $300,000.00 to pay off their mortgage, and I told him I just spent my last million on the parking lot, and to try me again tomorrow. They gave out a wheezy meth-addled laugh and walked on. I’m not sure what to make of Santa Cruz.. on one hand, it seemed more like a southern California city rather than northern. There were way more skateboarders than cyclists. It was warmer, and there were a lot of people on the beach. Since I’ve never actually been to southern California, I honestly can’t say, but that’s what I imagine it would be like. On the other hand, the downtown area, especially along Pacific, was pretty nice. There were a lot of coffee shops, cheap eateries, galleries, cycle shops, record stores, and boutiques. It’s a college town.. it’s almost like Berkeley but no crackheads or crazy people living in trees. Perhaps it’s the..cough..best.. of both worlds? It also seemed like a town that once people finish college, they would actually want to stay there. You can’t say that for crappy southern college towns like Athens, Auburn or Columbia. So, I went to one of the few places open for brunch, the Walnut Grill (?), had a kick ass omelet with chicken apple sausage, lots of coffee, and my headache was way gone. I walked on back to the boardwalk and checked out the arcade for like 5 minutes before deciding that I’ve seen everything I wanted to see. Roller coasters are cool to take pictures of, but not to sit there and look at. I’m not getting on them by myself because that’s sort of sad, but I do think it’s a really nice thing to have, there aren’t that many seaside amusement parks left and I hope they keep it preserved, but I probably won’t be going back unless I somehow have kids. All in all, I say, Santa Cruz was a nice place to visit just to say you’ve been there. Route 17 back to Oakland was an extremely twisty drive, by the way. Don’t do it if you get carsick easily.
So that was my trip. I don’t have any further pontifications, I was just happy to have done it. In these difficult economic times, what with the price of gas, it’s getting harder and harder to go anywhere, so it was a good thing. My next trip, hopefully, will be to Portland, OR for Thanksgiving. Here’s hoping I can get a good 8 pages out of it as I just did here!