We left San Francisco on Wednesday 15^th October heading south towards Los Angeles with a stop planned first in Santa Cruz. We drove out of San Francisco through Silicon Valley – past the offices of Ebay and Paypal etc desperately looking for Facebook- with the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east of us as we headed south. (Having just finished reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild I was fascinated by this incredible landscape she encountered alone while walking the Pacific Crest Trail).

I have reams of notes of places we would like to see, feel we ought to see or have been told we must see. As I suspected we are probably managing to do only 1/3 of them. But I continue to read more books and add to the list. Anyway, as we were heading south I was flicking though my notes and discovered we were about to drive past one of Lonely Planet’s 1000 Ultimate Adventure locations; Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park in San Jose.

Apparently it’s the largest skate park in California (68,000 square feet) and is the same design as the one Tony Hawk has in his back garden and it has the world’s tallest vertical wall – not that the kids are quite up to that just yet!! So we pulled off the highway and hit the skatepark. $3 each seemed a reasonable price and as the boys were the only people there we decided it was a worthwhile detour!

We got to Santa Cruz early evening and were so excited about our campsite. Recommended by John and Diane we were in one of the 15 pitches at the Harbour. So basically a carpark again but this time along the harbours edge so made a very nice change from forests campsites! Best of all we had some lovely neighbours in Randy and his wife who were sweet to the kids and very helpful and chatty for the 3 nights we were there.

On our second night we had new neighbours Ken and Julie who although having lived in the USA for 40 years were originally from Lincoln and Yorkshire! We had 2 lovely evenings with them. Frozen margaritas in their RV one night and beers in ours the next. We had a great laugh with them and Charlie and Ken become firm friends!

We had been fobbing the kids off over the last few weeks since we left Abbotsford and their skateboard fun with promises of how California was the skateboard mecca and that we would let them do loads of it once we were there. So we had to actually make good on that and took them to the Santa Cruz skatepark two days in a row.

On the second day we were sat parked up outside the skatepark doing some work while the kids were boarding. We were a bit worried when we got there as it was packed with loads of older ‘kids’. But the boys weren’t worried at all so off they trotted. A while later we looked up to check they were ok and saw Charlie balanced at the top of a very steep ramp with a load of the ‘youths’ standing around egging him on. We watched and he did it – launched himself off it to huge whoops and cheers and clapping – about 20 of them stopped and watched him do it. Then he came back round and they were all shaking his hand and fist bumping him etc etc We then saw one of them hand him something he put straight into his pocket – bit worried what that might be, hen a second then a third one did the same. He’d hustled them all – came away with $15. Forget their loom band business idea – this is far more lucrative!!

I remember Santa Cruz from The Lost Boys and the boardwalk and funfair are just as they were in the movie. Sadly no sign of gorgeous vampires! We had a lovely afternoon and evening on the wharf. They built it 100 years ago hoping the town would become a busy port. Then someone pointed out that the boardwalk and fairground were far more lucrative a pull for tourism! So it is full of surfers, beach volleyball and boarders! After dinner we stood for ages watching the seals underneath the wharf. Fighting and barking at each other. Jumping up onto the pilons to sunbathe. They were very entertaining and we decided would probably preclude us from needing to visit any Seaworld type show anytime soon!

We also spotted our first raccoon here, which was very exciting. And the kingfishers and herons that hung out at the harbour kept the boys entertained – we especially loved this fella sat pretty permanently at the fish cleaning station.

I found a chiropractor in town and got my back put back into a slightly less painful shape. Then on the Saturday morning we wandered down the harbour one last time (amazed at the amount of boats still moored up and not being used on a beautiful sunny Saturday – what a waste!). We had a lovely breakfast on the terrace of a restaurant on the beach and watched the beach scene marveling at how lovely it must be to live somewhere where the sun shines so consistently!! Then finally dragged ourselves away early afternoon to head down the coast a little further to another one of those places we’d been told we ‘must see’ – Morro Bay.