![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This time I found the Highway 17 bus with ease, after having enough savvy to check the schedule and the exact location of the stop online. It was a beautiful sunny morning and I had been planning to photograph the mountains as we drove through them, so I positioned myself on the left next to a window that was open a little way, to avoid the blue-tinted glass. But after we half-dozen passengers had clambered aboard, including the guy with a backpack who had sat under a shade tree on somebody's lawn impatiently drinking water and the elderly chappie whose hands shook as he fed his bills in to pay the fare, we had a minor contretemps with a guy getting on just before we turned onto 1st St, with a bag and a wind or brass instrument case, then agitating as if he needed to go back for something, and forcing the driver to let him off at the next corner . . . then as we approached Diridon Station we saw another Highway 17 bus and a crowd of people standing next to it in the beating sun. Evidently the bus an hour earlier had broken down before even reaching the mountains. This made our bus rather full. I wound up with an excitable guy sitting next to me and his wife and daughter in front of me, so I didn't take out my camera. Which was rather a pity since I had a spectacular view of the reservoir, in particular. We also had an unkempt guy with a sack wound around his shoulders who proclaimed loudly about Jesus as he got on - and off - the bus, a chap in a wheelchair, a lady in a tie-died shift dress, a guy in a beige suit with a stack of books who wrote on a yellow pad throughout the journey . . . and of course me, the overweight middle-aged woman in a bandana with jalapenos on it, reading old newspapers. Excitable man asked whether there were any bus wrecks in my newspaper and I had to tell him it was an old one. Also, no, no bus wrecks.
The bus actually wheezed less on the climb than the one a few years ago, or else the conversation drowned it out.
Santa Cruz remains funky. I saw a bird's nest in a traffic light hanging over an intersection. (It was in the green.) Pacific Avenue downtown is a nice welcoming shopping street with so many leafy trees it is hard to get a picture of:
There are still pretty clifftop houses, some of them perched above surf shops:
and even rooming houses perched on cliffs above bike shops:
I like this motel's approach to the concept of hedge:
and this lot were drumming on the promenade with admirable insouciance:
But I noted with some sadness that they had ripped out a whole bunch of old businesses and were going to put in more condos like the ones near the bus depot, and at least one of the wonderful steep paths up to the clifftop streets has been closed for safety reasons:
However, the gaudy Deco boardwalk building is still there with seagulls standing atop it:
and the beach behind it still looks like old Coney Island:
That was taken from the pier; this time I walked a little way out along it, picking my way carefully behind the people with fishing rods set up. Nobody seemed to be getting a bite. Below them, a man was determinedly doing laps between a buoy and the beach. Signs warned about overhead casting near flags, but not about nailing swimmers, and the lifeguards likewise seemed to think he was capable of looking after himself. There was actually a sign posted warning that the water was polluted and dangerous, though it hardly looked it. I found a portentous piece of modern sculpture near the start of the pier and waited to photograph it when the slightly squiffy lads carrying skateboards were no longer obscuring the view of the deep blue, the island rising out of it, and the humongous yacht riding at anchor offshore like a pirate galleon:
Then I took off my shoes and scrunched down to the shoreline to blót a little bottle of wine. Noting that the copious amounts of dead seaweed and the ubiquitous sandflies are a biohazard. The waves were making holes in the sand and throwing up the seaweed - it tangled around my ankles as I stood, and was forming bodies as I watched:
and getting into kids' sandcastles and excavations, along with the seagulls:
The gulls were quite numerous, mostly scruffy, and didn't pay much attention to me:
I did also see the black head of what looked like a tern swimming in the waves.
Despite the big concern with safety it is still possible to walk under the pier to and from the main part of the beach, and in the damper sand under there it was clear from many pawprints that the ban on dogs on the beach was also being healthily flouted.
On my way back to the bus I took a long tour through the fairground at the end of the boardwalk, but the pics of that are on another camera.
As I walked up Pacific Avenue to catch the 7:15 bus back to San Jose, I spied a life-sized plush manta ray in the window of the Salvation Army store. Bright red with black leopard spots. So I bought it, for $1.76.
I had plenty of time to catch the bus - it was late. So the sun was setting behind the mountains as we wove over them, casting a pink tinge on the hillsides as we approached the city. In the dusk I glimpsed the two Los Altos cats keeping watch under the hill. I got off at Diridon Station and was disappointed to find it has no drinks machine, but eventually a 22 bus came along to the arena stop across the street and took me home.
The bus actually wheezed less on the climb than the one a few years ago, or else the conversation drowned it out.
Santa Cruz remains funky. I saw a bird's nest in a traffic light hanging over an intersection. (It was in the green.) Pacific Avenue downtown is a nice welcoming shopping street with so many leafy trees it is hard to get a picture of:
There are still pretty clifftop houses, some of them perched above surf shops:
and even rooming houses perched on cliffs above bike shops:
I like this motel's approach to the concept of hedge:
and this lot were drumming on the promenade with admirable insouciance:
But I noted with some sadness that they had ripped out a whole bunch of old businesses and were going to put in more condos like the ones near the bus depot, and at least one of the wonderful steep paths up to the clifftop streets has been closed for safety reasons:
However, the gaudy Deco boardwalk building is still there with seagulls standing atop it:
and the beach behind it still looks like old Coney Island:
That was taken from the pier; this time I walked a little way out along it, picking my way carefully behind the people with fishing rods set up. Nobody seemed to be getting a bite. Below them, a man was determinedly doing laps between a buoy and the beach. Signs warned about overhead casting near flags, but not about nailing swimmers, and the lifeguards likewise seemed to think he was capable of looking after himself. There was actually a sign posted warning that the water was polluted and dangerous, though it hardly looked it. I found a portentous piece of modern sculpture near the start of the pier and waited to photograph it when the slightly squiffy lads carrying skateboards were no longer obscuring the view of the deep blue, the island rising out of it, and the humongous yacht riding at anchor offshore like a pirate galleon:
Then I took off my shoes and scrunched down to the shoreline to blót a little bottle of wine. Noting that the copious amounts of dead seaweed and the ubiquitous sandflies are a biohazard. The waves were making holes in the sand and throwing up the seaweed - it tangled around my ankles as I stood, and was forming bodies as I watched:
and getting into kids' sandcastles and excavations, along with the seagulls:
The gulls were quite numerous, mostly scruffy, and didn't pay much attention to me:
I did also see the black head of what looked like a tern swimming in the waves.
Despite the big concern with safety it is still possible to walk under the pier to and from the main part of the beach, and in the damper sand under there it was clear from many pawprints that the ban on dogs on the beach was also being healthily flouted.
On my way back to the bus I took a long tour through the fairground at the end of the boardwalk, but the pics of that are on another camera.
As I walked up Pacific Avenue to catch the 7:15 bus back to San Jose, I spied a life-sized plush manta ray in the window of the Salvation Army store. Bright red with black leopard spots. So I bought it, for $1.76.
I had plenty of time to catch the bus - it was late. So the sun was setting behind the mountains as we wove over them, casting a pink tinge on the hillsides as we approached the city. In the dusk I glimpsed the two Los Altos cats keeping watch under the hill. I got off at Diridon Station and was disappointed to find it has no drinks machine, but eventually a 22 bus came along to the arena stop across the street and took me home.
From:
no subject