In Santa Cruz

Summertime reader, last weekend we managed to venture outside the Bay Area for the first time in I don't know how long. We visited Santa Cruz, roughly a 50 mile drive from here, and of course we got slightly sunburned, despite slapping on plenty of sunblock.

The drive to Santa Cruz involves a quick sprint down 101, then onto 85, and finally through the mountains on State Route 17, lovingly described by Wikipedia as "one of the most dangerous highways in the state". For what is essentially a motorway, it's pretty winding with lots of relatively steep sections. Obviously, we're in the US here, so maintenance standards are perhaps marginally better than your average farm track in the UK, but barely what you would recognize as a high-speed dual carriageway between major towns. Anyway, a weight of approximately 53kg placed in the passenger seat results in my car handling much more safely than it otherwise does, so of course we survived the ordeal.

Santa Cruz is a fairly small town, famous for a couple of things: my favourite coffee roasters, Verve, and surfing.

We took in both, with the help of our local guide, my work colleague Nicole. We met Nicole at Verve, and she took us for a short stroll which terminated with a local shop selling fantastic breakfast burritos:

Breakfast or brunch?

Burritos are the archetypal San Francisco area food; or rather the "Mission burrito" variant which seems to be fairly ubiquitous these days. A breakfast burrito basically has bacon, egg and potato in it as well.

The coast here tends to be fairly cloudy, so you'd be forgiven for imagining this picture is actually Cornwall:

Unfortunately I didn't manage to capture the surfboard with a dog on it, which would of course make this unmistakably California.

Soon the sun came out, and we spent some time lazing on the beach, during which I tried to avoid sand knackering the keyboard on my work laptop (failed), and Helen did some beading. Beach life here is surprisingly high energy: the locals weren't sitting around frying in their own juices, they were surfing playing frisbee, chucking balls at each other, and generally being fairly active. It's also clear that being on the beach isn't an all-day thing here: we saw plenty of people popping down for an hour or two before wandering off.

We also visited Capitola Village, where the definitions of social distancing were stretched to breaking point:

Overall, Santa Cruz was lovely and it was great to get an intro from a local guide. We returned home, sunburned and refreshed, and happy that we'd managed to have at least some kind of adventure.