28th April

So onward today via Safeway a decent supermarket over here where we where given a club card,
no strings attached, which gives about 10% of all purchases and more on some individual items.

Santa Cruz, not far up the road was our next port of call.  A university town which was full of
young people helped I suppose by it being Saturday.  Stopped off in the centre and wandered round a bit before lunching at a kiosk on the main pedestrian area.

California so far has not lived up to anything like the Beach Boys music and I suppose that was all I had to go on, I have also to face the fact I'm not a teenager or early twenties or even thirties any longer and different things might now interest me more.

Beach life to date has appeared none existent, though it has been cold, windy and is only just spring out here.

Today in Santa Cruz it is hotter and we angled towards the beaches renowned for 'sun sand and surf'.
The areas we could see were in fact packed with people, mostly young, playing on volleyball courts as far as you could see.  The 'famed 'boardwalk' over half mile long fun fair was overwhelming but packed too.  Parking for us and most other cars was impossible in spite of huge car parks.  Perhaps this is California Sunshine and beach life.  Earlier paragraph obviously applies.

Sea in this area is getting progressively colder and wet suits are a necessity all year round for most people.
.

Santa Cruz rv park was our resting place for the night.  All these big rv parks are vaguely similar , smallish pitches, called sites, virtually the whole park being taken up by people living on site. Passable washrooms called rest rooms and little else.  The description of extended parking lots with one or two trees springs to mind. We are only staying for one night and living in these sites is not ideal.  I suppose some of the sub prime mortgage scandel over here was lending up to 140% of notional value to people on sites such as these, madness.