Vacation - Day 4

I got out of the hotel room about an hour after waking up on the last day. Partly because I wanted to start the day, and party because I had to get out of the hotel room by noon. The following goal to accomplish was feeding myself.

After a short time of driving around in circles, slightly confused by the 1-way streets, I eventually found my way to the downtown area. Finding somewhere to part was surprisingly easy, probably because the large parking lot wasn’t taken up with a farmer’s market, as the signs indicated had happened the day before.

I walked down the street one way and at what seemed to be the end of the business area I noticed an Indian food restaurant. I had been having a surprising desire for Indian food since the day before so I jumped at the chance. The food was quite tasty, although, the amount of Dal was a bit smaller then I had anticipated. This was of course offset by the Spinach portion and butternut squash mush that came with it. Overall it was a pretty tasty meal.

Unfortunately I had quite a few hours to kill before my friend who lived in Santa Cruz finished his prior arrangements. The other guy I knew I couldn’t seem to get a hold of. So, I walked all the way down the main street the opposite direction and at the other end bought a jamba juice before heading back to my car. Next, I drove out to the coast and followed it to some kind of “Surf Museum.” I didn’t really care to see that however so I instead just parked my car and walked along the cliffs overlooking the ocean. After spending quite some time there I made my way down to some touristy wharf and strolled all the way down that and back.

The sights of all the hordes of people on the beaches got me wanting to take a bit of a swim. I, of course, didn’t own any swimming trunks. I made my way back downtown to do a bit of shopping. Right after I was stepping out of the store with my new blue swimming trunks and some horribly stupid “Santa Cruz” beach towel, my phone began to ring. It was sometime after 3 at this point, and he had some bad news for me. He had forgotten that he promised to see a movie, however I was welcome to join them. I happened to be standing across the street from a large movie theater and asked him if that was the place he was going. He was a bit taken back that I somehow knew and then started saying that he could see me. It’s a bit silly when you are on the phone with someone you can see but don’t know it.

Anyway, having spent most of the day alone and in the blaring hot sun, I went ahead and watched the movie with them. Unfortunately this was Harry Potter, but the second viewing was a bit better then the first one. It was also a little interesting to see the differences in how the theater was operating.

After the movie I simply had to goto the beach. It would have been to much of a waste to buy these items and not use them. So he took me to, I think it was Starbright Beach, or something like that. It was a very nice beach, the funny part about it being the only thing that separated it from the Boardwalk beach was a little outcropping of rocks. This appeared to be enough to have the crowd on the beach be a good 5000 people fewer though. The water was very cold but it felt pretty good.

We didn’t stay to long, probably a good thing since I didn’t have any sunscreen or anything. But we were hungry. He showed me a cool little place that you could get basically any Asian food you desired. This was kind of weird, most restaurants only allow you to pick from one ethic group’s cuisine. I ended up with a pretty standard chinese chicken and rice bowl, and my friend got some kind of peanut sauce thai noodles.

It was after dinner that I decided it would be wise to start the journey home. My friend suggested taking highway-17 out of Santa Cruz because there was a fire starting up somewhere near highway-1's exit. I filled up my tank one last time, and took his advice. It was a pretty pleasant drive home, only about 2 hours. When I got back into town I dropped by a friend’s house. It was his birthday and I just had to stop by. From there on out it was just a pretty standard night.