Santa Cruz

When I think of California it is countryside I see, golden hillsides of burnt grass dotted with splotches of dark green oak trees. You can see why lack of water is a problem in this desert: 

A few miles inland, hidden from the ocean by a mountain range. 

An environment totally different from the coast, baking  hot summers with cold foggy winters. 

And then you climb the last range of hills and descend to the sea. 

This is a completely different world of cool summer sea breezes attracting tech millionaires who in turn drive up horrendous prices for real estate. They’d rather live here than in the baking heat of inland California.  

It’s a pretty town I used to live in, nestled between the Santa Cruz mountains and Monterey Bay. 

The Santa Cruz climate is mild in summer with cooling breezes off the cold ocean waters with winters of cold and damp yet largely snow-free except perhaps on the mountain tops. With Silicon Valley an hour away remote work is easy so the wealthy come here to live by the sea to manage their factories located in the heat of the inland valley. 

Low income housing, homelessness and working poverty are all the usual issues here. If you want to move here you need money or you need the ability to rough it. Street living is normal downtown, so get a van and come and test your resilience! 

We moochdock here scrounging off friends, parking in driveways and using their showers. You can buy showers in the community centers for five bucks but we are the privileged friends from out of town! 

Somehow Santa Cruz works at staying weird, encouraging artists and performers and experimental self expression and all those sorts of edgy arts and crafts. How they live here being artists I don’t know. Trust funds maybe. I keep learning new terms and expressions from the hippest and wokest avant-garde artistes in Sant Cruz. My lack of appreciation marks me as a curmudgeon. 

The homeless population is vast and ubiquitous so car living is just one more form of affordable housing and it frankly boggles my mind how many van dwellers we see cluttering the streets. It’s as though the most expensive place in the country for rental homes (officially so rated), is ashamed of the label and thus has given up regulating alternative living. Rooftop hatch open, windows covered…I see van life! 

I stopped downtown one evening to empty our porta potty discreetly into a public pit toilet. My wife whose office used to be across the street was correct: someone was living in it, just as Layne had warned me there would be an overnight toilet dweller. 

I drove out to the beach and used a public toilet there as our back up plan. I see lots of RVs for instance on the west side of the city and no pit toilets. I dread to think of where they are emptying their effluent. Probably not at the ten dollar campground dump stations. 

We have at least four different driveways we have been invited to use and we get to enjoy free hot showers at the owners’ encouragement. I follow Layne’s lead as I would be just as happy street living and showering at the community centers if I wanted to stay in Santa Cruz. 

Its not hard to blend in around here though because we are travelers not residents we wouldn’t fit in among the rather down at heel types who haunt these hang outs. They live on the streets in closed communities but we affluent travelers are in a different social stratum. It’s all nonsense to me but egalitarianism is offensive on the top and the bottom rungs of society. 

A friend of mine asked how Florida deals with homelessness and my rather glib reply was by ignoring it. Key West has always been a magnet for the homeless and hopeless, and in my opinion has done as good a job as one might hope considering it’s size and resources. California seems hopeless to me such that cities are awash in unsanitary homeless encampments. 

The homeless camps are everywhere and affordable housing is nowhere to be seen. There is lots of new construction all over Santa Cruz for instance but none of it will house the poor. 

So you step over the indigent and pretend they aren’t there. It’s a weird compromise but I can adapt for the short time I am here. 

I’m “unhoused” as California’s political lingo has it but by choice. I am looking forward to some high desert and mountain public lands in the western states after I get back from my European family visit to be unhoused in beauty rather than urban squalor. 

My sisters have lived their lives farming in the same spot for their entire lives in Central Italy. Explaining my happiness living the nomad life in the States will not really be possible but after the first few questions about  my dubious choices my lifestyle as incomprehensible as it is will fade into the background. 

I like life on the road and as I search for a place to sleep, or empty our trash, or fill our water tank or empty our toilet I find doing chores doesn’t fill me with the existential dread that chores used to when I was housed.  Taking the trash out every Monday used to be a marker, another week of sameness accomplished, the last the sane as the next. Nowadays I have no idea where any of it might happen. 

Layne remarked that the past 21 months have felt like a decade as we have explored our continent and our selves. She enjoys the silliness of life in a van as much as I do. 

She prefers California where she feels at home and where I feel like an interloper in someone else’s circus: 

It’s all good as the cliché has it. Quiet nights, long conversations with friends and overpriced foods. All the other stuff is just a passing backdrop to life on the road. 

The Golden State

As goes California so goes the US and eventually the rest of the World. 

The problem with that well worn aphorism is that it is based in truth and it drives people nuts. There is a great deal of time and energy spent trying to prove its not true but California trundles on heedless. 

Driving out of El Portal on a Sunday morning Highway 140 had a few cars heading into the park but almost none traveling in our direction. We crossed the state in four hours when no one was looking and we had the weird selection of roads Google selected for us, to ourselves. 

Some of the farm roads were appalling, putting me in mind of the first of Mexican roads we had driven recently in the wilderness of the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua State.

These are the fields and orchards that produce fruits and vegetables sold all over North America. We see brands in Mexican supermarkets that we recognize from the Salinas Valley. 

Water is splashed over this arid soil like there is an unlimited supply and fruits grow under plastic hot houses that look to my eye like they were designed after prairie schooners with their arched covers. A pioneer wagon parking lot: 

But the world knows California from Hollywood and Silicon Valley and Napa wineries and world class national parks and a population bursting at the seams of more than  forty million people. 

Politicians mock California to make points and youngsters wear fashionable clothes all over the world that refer to the Golden State. I am pretty much indifferent to all of it. Layne grew up in California so I see us spending more time here to be close to her many friends but for me my home is aboard GANNET2 wherever parked. 

I lived here for twenty years and I have very mixed feelings about the place. I never feel at home here, I don’t feel hip enough or radical enough to feel at home among the coastal hippies and techies or the old school conservative valley farmers and ranchers. They are all indifferent to me and my imagined social shortcomings so I drift through the landscape not of it, nor am I desirous to settle down here. 

We stopped for lunch in San Juan Bautista, once upon a time a day trip destination from our home in Santa Cruz. The mission church was made famous by Alfred Hitchcock (who had a home outside Santa Cruz) in his thriller Vertigo when he created a bell tower atop the church from which to throw Kim Novak. 

The history books will tell you the church was built in 1797 and has had mass said in it since 1812 when Napoleon was afoot secularizing Europe. On Sunday it was packed and late arrivals were praying in the bilingual garden.

This, you will be happy to know us the only remaining Spanish Plaza in California. Had you lived here in the Spanish and subsequently Mexican administrations you’d have seen the civil and religious heart of what is now San Benito County operating here. 

As it is Spanish is widely spoken and on a Sunday, picnics are the order of a leisurely day where we saw lots of Latino families enjoying their time together in the sun.   

And the auto industry that you are so fond of -I know I am!- is preserved in its original form in a barn on the square. 

They call the carriage house the Plaza Stables. 

We stopped for lunch at the Jardines de San Juan of fond memory. 

The gardens are as we remembered them but the food wasn’t. 

The portions were ridiculously huge but my burrito was bland. I hadn’t had a California burrito in a long while and mine was the size of a football. One side was melted cheese, the middle was beans and the other side was the meat. All of it insipid. Layne insisted on to-go  boxes promising we have hot sauce and spices in the van to make it edible later. GANNET2 to the rescue! It was a shame the food was that way because we had great memories of the place. 

Everything costs more here, gas is around five dollars for regular forcing us to haunt Costco for the best possible price. Eating out is absurd and as we found not always delicious.  But our friends live here and we enjoy the scenery and being nomads we are passing through so everything is good for us. Santa Cruz is our turning point of course so from the ocean we will go east and spend a few weeks in the mountains of Utah and Colorado before we see Chicago and the east. It’s all part of the variety of sea to shining sea over the next three months. 

GANNET2 makes a great home for us. 

Yosemite

When I was a police dispatcher in Key West my worst commute home was always on those days when I found myself trailing a marked police car also going home down Highway One. Any motorist who spots a police car in their mirror feels the need to drive at least five miles per hour below the limit. Except me…I wanted to get home dammit!

I was reminded of this workday irritation as we followed my wife’s nephew to his workplace in Yosemite. Fortunately the drive up Highway 140 from his home into the park is by nature slow speed and the scenery of course is as you might expect in such a place as you drive into the famous park.  

If you get stuck up a cliff or lost in the wilderness his might be the first happy face you would be very glad to see. He was hired as Yosemite’s first full time law enforcement climbing ranger and now supervises a dozen part time and full time seasonal wilderness rangers. I can’t fathom climbing rock faces for fun never mind rescuing the hapless or collecting the remains of those who fall off. It’s just not what you think of when you go to the National Park. 

I never got over the beauty of the Keys when I lived and worked there and Layne always appreciated her commute over the fabled Seven Mile Bridge. 

Jesse has an office in Yosemite and isn’t always out in the wilderness but he too hasn’t lost his appreciation for the place where he lives out his career. 

It’s hard to imagine how you could. 

We went for a walk then he went to work and we were on our own. 

It was a busy weekday but not excessive. There is no secret law enforcement back road into the park and we would have had to sit and wait at the entrance had there been a line. 

We did park at first in the employee area in back but we found spots even for our huge van along the roads out of the village. Yosemite Village was full and there was no vehicle access but then as we drove along the valley floor we found places to stop. 

During Covid Yosemite had a reservation system for entry which has been dropped this year but we found the park to be very accessible even with Tioga Road to be closed. 

I don’t need to point out  this place is worth the time.  I first came here on my Vespa tour in 1981 and when I lived on the coast in Santa Cruz I’d bring my van up during all four seasons and it was always magical. 

I worried about crowds but I shouldn’t have. Nor should you. 

Except on weekends. Stay away on weekends I’m pretty sure.

We spent Saturday at Jesse’s home outside the park. Lines were long we were told. 

There were crowds of course but no one makes eye contact so you can feel as alone as you like. 

We had planned a free shuttle ride…but…umm… crowds as you can see. 

Yosemite Falls, a ranger told me, is 2400 feet high in three stages and there is a ton of water pouring out of the exceptional winters snow pack. 









The National Parks are brilliant. Everybody is welcome. Even dogs on paved paths. 

John Muir fought tooth and nail to preserve the Hetch Hetchy valley next door. He failed and they dammed the river and gave the valley and the water it contained to the city of San Francisco to slake the city’s thirst. The fight today is to open Hetch Hetchy to recreation.  



I took Rusty for his own walk. Redwood trees have their own fascination it seems. 

Yosemite is a particular mixture of the banal and the spectacular. Behind the buildings that manage the daily functions rise these unbelievable (I mean that precisely) rocks. 

On the subject of rocks one sedentary Yosemite sport is to park at El Capitan meadows and watch people imitating spiders on impossibly smooth granite faces. 



They say it takes week to climb the rock called El Capitan so the mountaineers are forced to  sleep on platforms they carry and then anchor to the wall each night. They crap in plastic bags and some climbers drop them to the ground. Guess who started his career collecting the bags on the valley floor. Glamorous eh? I never really paid much attention to the effort required to manage one of the most popular wilderness attractions in the world. Then I walked past the Federal courthouse  where a magistrate sits to judge the myriad crimes committed on Federal land. 

It’s a great drive in and out whichever road you take. There are lots of pull outs for slower traffic so even driving the tank I get to travel at my own speed and  let others do the same. I was told it is an exceptionally mild spring this year with cold nights and pleasantly warm days, air conditioning not needed. Which it normally in if you want to sleep in June. Our visit gave us perfect weather.  

We also drove 45 minutes to Mariposa, the nearest “large town” where Jesse’s wife Megan works as an ER nurse in the tiny hospital. They have that lovely old age pension plan firmly in their sights as they raise their two children. And Mariposa could be a lovely spot to retire after a life of service in the park. I really liked the town.  We ordered a cold cut dinner to share and I found Old Speckled Hen to wash it down.  

It was a lovely cool but not cold evening shaded under an expansive fig tree; we might have been van lifing across Greece. 

Rusty had had a long day. He is getting gray just like me.