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. 

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.