Visiting Santa Cruz with Ryan and Jessi

By Jason

Ryan and Jessi came out to visit us in California and see all the sights. We tried not to disappoint them, taking them on a whirlwind tour of the Bay Area. In this post I’ll talk about the first few days, in the south bay and down to Santa Cruz. Next I’ll write about our day in San Francisco.

First we bummed around Mountain View a bit. Here you can see us pondering a poster offering Scientology “personality tests” for free. Later we had to politely brush off an actual Scientologist. It’s like we’re in Hollywood! We ate at Shabuway, which you might remember from a previous post.

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Next Ann took them on a tour of the local wineries. I wasn’t there so she’ll have to fill you in on what happened. We also had lunch at Google and I did a little tour. You would think by now that I would be getting pretty good at giving tours, but it’s mostly: “here’s some weird thing, here’s the dinosaur, and let’s eat!”

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I took Friday off and Ann is finished with her contract at Oakland Kaiser so we were able to drive down toward Santa Cruz and the beach.  Our first stop was at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park where they do indeed have giant redwoods.

The trees are this big!

This picture might help give you an idea how big the trees are, click on it to see larger versions at Flickr:

Incredibly Tall Giant California Redwood

We just took a quick walk around the Redwood Grove Trail.  No wading through ice-cold rivers this time.  I was pretty disappointed because we didn’t see a single banana slug, though at the end of the trail this squirrel jumped out of a rustic decorative garbage recpetical and posed for our cameras.

Bushy-tailed squirrel

Jessi was kind enough to procure some hoarhound candy at the old-timey store which has done wonders curing Ann’s nausea.  I don’t have any hoarhound pictures but here’s a shot of me licking all the green apple flavor off old-fashioned rock candy.  Rock candy always seems like a good idea but then I get sick of it almost immediately.

Rock Candy is always disappointing.

We ate at Redwood Pizzeria and then headed down to Santa Cruz, home of the famous Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk where The Lost Boys was filmed.  We didn’t see any vampires, but we did see sea lions from the wharf.

Sea Lions from the Santa Cruz Wharf

We walked along the beach a bit but the water was too cold for swimming.

This water is far too cold

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The boardwalk has an amusement park with roller coasters as well as a couple of large arcades.  Everything shut down at about 5p.m., thought, which seems kind of strange for a Friday night.  Maybe it isn’t really boardwalk season yet.  Before everything closed Jessi got her fortune read by this creepy old fortune machine but it did not cause her to wake up as Tom Hanks the next morning.

Creepy old fortune teller on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk

We took a quick drive over to Natural Bridges State Beach to see the natural bridges.  There’s actually only one left.  It’s a pretty cool little park, with a creek flowing into the ocean on a small sandy beach.

Natural Bridges State Beach

Super happy fun time at beach, great job!

I'll just chill here

The dunes where covered with what I think is ice plant flowers (but please correct me if I’m wrong), which you can see in the picture.

Flowers in the dunes

Up the beach was a rocky area where we watch waved crashing and looked for sea life in little tide pools.  There were a lot of anemones and a few little crabs but no sand dollars or any other pelagic currency.

Sea anemone in tide pool

Next I’ll write about our trip to San Francisco.  In the mean time, I have lots more photos up on Flickr (and follow this link to see photos on Ann’s Flickr page too).

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