Odds & Ends From Our Santa Cruz Trip

This ride is the "Cliffhanger" and it's a lot of fun.

It is as close to flying as you are going to intentionally get in an amusement park. Note, the dude in the middle pod on the top, looks a little like Vincent D'Onofrio.



Here is the bluff, overlooking the Boardwalk from the north. There are some nice hotels and motels up there. There is one in particular that is under renovation and it has given me a great idea for a story. The apartment building down below is also very inspirational.

I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself
"This could be Heaven or this could be Hell"

Actually, I didn't hear a mission bell, Don Henley, but I did hear Sublime, the first time we walked by. It wasn't colitas I smelled either, but raggediest of ragweed. Yet, La Bahia apartments are a fine representation of the Spanish Colonial-style and they definitely give off a Hotel California-vibe.







Nice balcony, eh? If a great writer is not among the current tenants or has not ever lived there before, it's not the fault of the building, for it teems with motivation...or is that Ghost of Unrequited Writing Past?




Here is a bed and breakfast on the left, a new townhouse condos with a Victorian flair in the middle and a railroad bridge on the right. At the bottom of the pic you can see the dedicated bicycle lane along with the rubber baby buggy bumpers...I mean, the rubber bumpers to keep cars off of bicyclists.


There are somethings that Santa Cruz does better than any other city in California and this dedicated bike lane with protection, is one of them.

So We Went To Santa Cruz Part II.

So in Santa Cruz, the main attraction is the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk...

Then of course, on the "Boardwalk," you have the "Board Wok." Ha, puns abound down there, as well as movies. "The Lost Boys" and "Sudden Impact" were filmed there. We didn't see any conventional vampires or people menacing Sondra Locke.



This is an animatronic pirate, though I can't remember his name, the parrot's name is "Seaweed."



Then this is my childhood nightmare transplanted some ninety miles south, "Laughing Sal." She used to be near the front gate of Playland.

As it was explained to me several times, "she used to scare the hell out of your when you were a kid." Of course they placed her on the beach side of the Boardwalk, as opposed to the street side where, I don't know, a paintball drive-by might happen? Needless to say, this isn't over, animatronic wench...

The long view of the Boardwalk.

Where is there a casino that no one can gamble at?

Games of chance for kids where they get paid off with crappy plastic toys and have absolutely no chance of getting the better prizes because they need at least $3,000 worth of winning tickets, don't count.

You can have a wedding reception or party at the Coconut Grove, I guess. I never looked into, though that's what it says.

And a touch of the South, comes to California. "Deep Fried Twinkies," because regular Twinkies somehow do not clog your arteries fast enough.

And since you asked, why, yes, they are.

I waited ten minutes for Pamela Anderson to come out of this shack...needless to say what did come out of that shack? Well, you wouldn't want to see it running in slow or regular motion.

The mural above the mini-golf course. The lava glows...kinda. The course used to be an indoor pool.

Junior and me on the Tornado. You decide how fast it spins by turning the inner wheel...

"Anne get me off of this crazy thing!"

Another twenty seconds and I would've hurled.

The Boardwalk at night, a fitting end to this post.

So We Went To Santa Cruz

So we went down to Santa Cruz this past Sunday, a beautiful town that isn't quite bucolic and it does have a touch of city in it. The one aspect where they fail to live up to city behaviour is in how polite they are. I mean if you pull up to an intersection and there is someone crossing, they will insist that you go first...even if you wave them on.

Even if you firmly insist that they go.

Even if you shout at them to go.

Even if you threaten them at knife-point, they will insist that you go first.

Sometimes it takes five whole minutes to cross an intersection in Santa Cruz, they are even too polite to be Californians. If they weren't so damn polite, you'd want to slap and say "wake the f**k up, yo! You're in f**ckin' California and you need to rude it up!" But you don't, because they are so incredibly polite that they make you tilt your head and go "ahhhh," just like a basket of puppies.

This is the Boardwalk, though they have another almost adjacent to it with an amusement park and I'll post photos of those tomorrow or the day after. Thank God that they have rude-ass bums just like we do in San Francisco, or they would be no hope for that town ; )