The Legion Of Honor

One of the great mysteries of living in Santa Cruz California must be the gas station at Costco. The price of a gallon of regular around town amounts to something between $4:70 and $5:00 depending where you fill up. They sell regular at Costco for $4:16 so if you drive a 17 mpg van you gravitate toward the Costco pump. To our amazement most trips we make to the pumps with GANNET2 involve little or no wait.  Perhaps we’ve been lucky or perhaps we scare everyone away but we almost never find more than a car or two in line and often there is no wait at all. 

Sunday morning we took off with a full tank of the cheapest gas we could find for the 75 mile drive to The City, as Francisco is known to northern Californians. Call it Frisco and you will be despised forever; don’t ask me why but “Frisco” for The City and “Cali” for the state are two terms that should never pass your lips.

We stopped at Layne’s favorite pie shop for breakfast pastry alongside California Highway One, the coast road. Rusty wanted to linger but we pressed on to Half Moon Bay where we discovered heavy coastal traffic, eager beach goers looking for fog and sand for the day. We turned inland and drove past a traffic jam more than seven miles long right over the coastal mountains into Silicon Valley. 

We turned north and followed I-280 toward the city away from the coastal traffic jam which stretched to the freeway intersection overhead as we drove north. It looked like a hellish way to spend a Sunday to me. 

Our route to the Palace of the Legion of Honor: 

The rest of the drive was uneventful and happily Google Maps sent us back out to the coast of San Francisco, the Sunset neighborhood away from downtown which is a mess of traffic and unsightly homelessness. You’ve probably heard about The City’s problems and I had no desire to revisit them. 

We drove the foggy streets past miles of multi million dollar town houses facing the Pacific Ocean, blocks away but driving cold damp fog uphill into the city streets. 

Layne made sandwiches, part of her economy drive when we pulled over to walk Rusty in Golden Gate Park. After six months in Latin America the cost of meals out in California came as a shock to the quartermaster so we eat groceries aboard. 

For such a heavily regulated state Golden Gate Park is an oasis of freedom. Walk where you like and enjoy a touch of wilderness in the City. There are activities like horse riding tours, and any bush may be home to a filthy neglected lunatic homeless person but the tranquility is amazing.  

Finding an open spot in the park for our tank was no problem and we also found an open space later for GANNET2 right in front of the museum entrance. Some people think a 21foot van is a problem to drive on the streets but we very rarely have difficulties owing to its size. GANNET2 in the ubiquitous fog:

They had a special exhibit on at the Legion of Honor, a building in Lincoln Park in the former city cemetery. I hadn’t been there for decades so a visit was on my list this visit. I also want to try to get to the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park where they have an Ansel Adams photography exhibit on display. The Legion of Hobor is undergoing “much needed” renovation: 

They had a special exhibit on the Tudors, the Kings and Queens who ruled Britain the dramatic years after  the fratricidal wars of succession between the houses of Lancaster and York. 

If you know nothing about them you’ve heard of Henry the Eighth: 

And Elizabeth the First, the Virgin Queen:

Alma de Bretteville Spreckels it a been in her bonnet to build a museum in Lincoln Park but her husband Adolph Spreckels wanted to spend his fortune on horse racing. She convinced him to back her plan and off she went to Europe to drum up support and inspiration during World War One, an odd time to tour France. 

It turns out the French had a building she quite liked housing the national exhibition of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. The French agreed to have her copy the building which was itself a replica of the Palais de La Légion d’Honneur built in 1782. So there you have it. 

The audio guides are always useful in these places. The entry ticket was twenty bucks each, add the ticket for the Tudor exhibition and the headphone rental and we spent about $70 at the Legion of Honor. 

Thanks to the Spreckels sugar barons the museum has a huge collection of Auguste Rodin sculptures. They took over the Hawaii sugar trade and invested in San Diego practically buying the city up. In those days billionaires covered their sins with culture offering public spaces their art collections and so forth. Their name is prominent at the Legion of Honor. Giving in private is not part of the schtick. 

Outside in the fog there are assorted exhibits and plaques which I wandered around to see after I got Rusty out of his sleep in the van. Joan of Arc in classic style: 

Tourists admiring the golfers. 

Holocaust Memorial: 

I need to remember to look this up: 

The end of the Cold War has produced endless surprises:

I seem to remember this as a representation of a sextant:

Rusty is freaking me out by growing gray hairs and slowing down. 

No visible parking skills. In Mexico it’s not a problem as everyone parks higgledy piggledy but here you’re supposed to fit between the lines not on them: 

And if the mood takes you remove your hoody and fling it into the fountain as a piece of art, or a statement, or a protest or something. 

And before we go a few pieces by Rodin, the famous ones that were supposed to adorn his monumental gate of hell sculpture. He died before he could put it together: 

Abandon hope all you who enter:

A nekkid dude whom I artfully dressed in a skirt! 

All very classical and earthquake proofed in 1995. 

Art does not delight everyone: 

A portrait by Joshua Reynolds’s depicting a classical scene where Paris in the sculpture is awarding the golden apple of beauty to the viscountess in his portrait and not the Graces as Greek myth told the story.  

Sir Joshua Reynolds’ 1779–1780 Work: Anne, Viscountess Townshend, later Marchioness Townshend In the Permanent Collection of the Legion of Honor

“Anne Montgomery (1752?–1819) was the second of three beautiful daughters of an Irish peer. Celebrated as the “Irish Graces,” the sisters were immortalized in 1773 by Sir Joshua Reynolds in a grand-manner portrait entitled Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (London, The Tate Gallery).

That same year, Anne became the second wife of George, fourth Viscount Townshend, later Marquess Townshend. In 1779–1780, she sat for Reynolds for this elegant, full-length portrait.

Treating portraiture as a branch of history painting, Reynolds used classical themes, poses and statuary as references to the past. Here, the carved relief at the lower left depicts the Judgment of Paris, a popular mythological theme, with one two goddesses. Paris appears to ignore them as he offers Anne the golden apple, a witty and flattering conceit implying that Anne herself is Venus, the third and fairest.”

And back to Rodin here is his long time mistress and eventual wife pouting we are told. He was not easy to live with they say especially if you prefer fidelity in a relationship: 

And Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) looking grumpy as he posed under protest. 

And then the ride home going through the city (NOT FRISCO) in the golden glow of evening.

I-280 passing Palo Alto: 

Highway 17 through the Santa Cruz mountains jammed with traffic leaving the beach on a Sunday evening: 

And I am off to Italy for two weeks to see my sisters for the first time since 2017.  What a different world that was. Layne Rusty and GANNET2 stay behind. After this pause we will head east hopefully spending a month wild camping Utah and Colorado. 

Pictures Of Santa Cruz

Tim and his Cheoy Lee sailboat. We first met in 1981.

Pete from England. Known him since the 1990s. 

Joe’s grandkids (I won at intergalactic Lego but I think they cheated and claimed victory):

Santa Cruz is mostly white with a sprinkling of Mexicans and Asians. 

The ocean is 58 degrees cold at the moment. 

Sunshine appears through the gray fog of the marine inversion but it only shines for a few hours after noon. Natural Bridges State Park on the far west side of the city. 

Dogs are not welcome of course.  I can take Rusty on most state beaches in Florida and the rest of the country but not in almost all of California. 

We have stopped moochdocking and are sleeping on the west side of town in an area known for its residentially challenged vehicle dwellers. 

We drove up the coast to have a picnic. The day was socked in with fog as we approached Davenport ten

miles north of Santa Cruz on California Highway One. 

The cold sea air rolls in and meets hot dry air over the land and the day turns sunless and gray under the inversion. It never rains in summer but it feels like it will. Bring a sweater. 

Big agriculture on the cliffs above the ocean. Brussels sprouts, strawberries and cabbage for sale around the country. 

A Chinese arch has sprouted in Santa Cruz recently. More lives that matter I suppose. California has been cruel to Asians over its history. 

Rusty likes the cool air and heavily dog populated streets of Santa Cruz. He is always sniffing the shrubbery where dogs have been.  

Santa Cruz is famous for its boardwalk which has a wooden roller coaster,  the last of its kind on a beach. 

Locals hate the boardwalk but I used to come down here by myself and played Pac Man in the arcades and rode the rides at night. My friends thought I was an idiot mixing with tourists but I had fun.  

The paradox in Santa Cruz is that the weather inland in the mountains is hot and dry compared to the cool damp coastal climate. Up in Scotts Valley where we stayed with a friend we also found a Mexican lady selling tamales from her Lexus. It was like being back in Mexico and they were delicious. 

I lived in the harbor for most of the 1980s taking my boat up and down the coast on my vacations. 

It’s a river estuary widened into a harbor and winter storms plug the harbor mouth with sand. They have a dredge to keep the entrance clear in winter to allow the fishing fleet to work. In summer you have to dodge the dredge pipes floating in the harbor mouth. 

The Moore 24 designed in Santa Cruz for downwind coastal racing. Webb Chiles caused a sailing stir by sailing round the world in one a few years ago:

I sailed a catamaran like this one below from here to Key West whereupon we settled down there. Key West always felt like home to me where I felt like an outsider here. 

Seabright Beach. Leashed dogs allowed. Yay! Except Rusty doesn’t enjoy it. Sigh. He is getting opinionated and cranky in old age, just like me. 

In the 1980s I worked as a janitor at the Nickelodeon cinema which has been closed since Covid. I was also a projectionist at a theater in nearby Capitola, and that theater has now been torn down. I got to see a lot of free movies before VCRs came on the scene. 

The railroad tracks into the Santa Cruz mountains have been revived as a tourist attraction in the village of Felton. You ride up from the Beach Boardwalk. I want to do it one day. 

We had lunch with Rosemary and Hula. Rosemary and I used to work together at KSCO radio before I moved to Key West. 

We had Nepalese dumplings for lunch on a shady terrace with Rusty sleeping at our feet. 

Santa Cruz is also known for its Victorian houses, beautiful and monstrous expensive. 

There is occasional modern apartment complex thrown in with a redwood tree in the backdrop here. 

The weirdest bay window I’ve ever seen: 

Rusty the explorer. We’ve started giving him glucosamine as he is getting a bit gray.  It seems to have perked him up. 

The foggy night closes in over our street parking spot: 

Happy Fourth of July everyone (Canadians have already had theirs). I’m off to Italy on Wednesday to see my sisters for two weeks. Then we shall get back into van travel and I can’t wait to explore Utah and Colorado for a few weeks.