Santa Cruz!

We returned from Santa Cruz this evening. To the left is the view we had out of our motel room window. We could not have been closer to the beach and the boardwalk.







We arrived Friday night. Saturday morning we went to Natural Bridges beach, which is in northern Santa Cruz. It has some sea stacks, one of which has a hole in it (visible at top left).







Owen had lots of fun playing on the beach.








Douglas did too, until he fell in and got soaked.








There were lots of pelicans on top of the sea stacks.








View across the beach. It was a really cool place.








Dan meandering







Next we went to Lighthouse Point, another coast spot in Santa Cruz.







It sits on the edge of some cliffs.








Owen and Douglas enjoyed walking along the path by the ocean.









We went to Lighthouse Point to catch some of the O'Neill Cold Water Classic, a surfing competition. It was somewhat crowded and hard to see the surfers, but the parts we could see were cool.





After that we had lunch in downtown Santa Cruz (at Pizza My Heart), and then went to the Boardwalk and played mini golf at a super cheesy pirate themed mini golf place, complete with pirates, cannons, black lights and various other kitsch. It was fun.








Douglas likes mini golf too.












Owen sitting on a barrel











Saturday evening we ate at Kiantis pizza and pasta place in downtown Santa Cruz, where to our surprise the wait staff did an amazing dance routine in the middle of dinner.





The pizza tossers got in on the act as well - you can see two of them at left throwing the pizza dough around between their legs, along their backs, etc. They were pretty amazing.

We topped off the evening at Marianne's, and Dan had the Mexican chocolate ice cream.



Today we stopped on the way home at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. It has a very cool thing where you can design a roller coaster on the computer and then sit in a pretend roller coaster car and watch the ride you designed.





The kids loved it, as well as various other fun stuff they had there.