Santa Cruz Pt. one

April 20th 2012


After Adrien drove the entire night through, he decided he couldn't drive any longer and asked me to drive. Seeing as I only had one hour of sleep in this moving machine, we decided to pull over and sleep in the parking lot of a food 4 less. By the time we woke up, the sun was up and I felt energized enough to drive. This is when the 1 freeway started to be a great idea, there were so many beautiful sights, the ocean just to the left of us, the rolling hills on the right. The cool air, the winding roads.

We took a pit stop in the small beach town of Cayucos to get some gas and to stretch out our limbs. Toph was pretty anxious the entire trip, I figure it was because she didn't like being cooped up in the car. So whenever we had the chance, we would let her out.

Adrien Parker being a robot, a penut butter bagel eating robot.

I told Adrien, "Hey if you see anything cool off the side of the road, tell me to stop, we are in no rush", this was one of the first random stops we made. Adrien saw a cool dilapidated house by the beach and so we thought we would check that out. Adrien went first while I made sure Toph was protected by the pest she might be encountering. We were both so surprised to see a beach full of Elephant Seals. Those two hugging in the picture, well, they weren't hugging, they were fighting pretty violently.

They seemed really friendly, and those eyes, they were pretty darn cute.

We made it to Santa Cruz around noon, after a stop in downtown Santa Cruz to collect ourselves (Adrien charging his dead phone), I took Adrien to a familiar beach that a dear friend once showed me. Right when we got down to the beach Toph found a friend to play with.

Happy dog.

It was so funny seeing Toph on the beach since it was her first time, she actually played fetch with the rocks along the shore. All she did was sniff sniff, bark bark, and run around like a happy dog.

Adrien coming out of the cave.

Towards the end of our first day in Santa Cruz, we ended up on the 9 highway north of the city. We thought it would be ideal to find a spot off the highway to sleep. Adrien and I came up with a story just incase we encountered a park ranger/cop telling us that we couldn't sleep in our car since we knew they were pretty strict about people sleeping in their cars, actually it's illegal in the city of Santa Cruz to sleep in your car which is... stupid. So our story was, we were driving all the way from Los Angeles, and we were going to camp at Big Basin Redwood State Park which was on the same highway we stopped on, and our car overheated so we couldn't make it up so we pulled over to let the car cool down and to get rest since we both were so tired from driving.

So that was our story, and as we set up the back of Adriens Honda crv into a bed, Adrien fell asleep right away. I was trying to sleep but I kept noticing the cars buzzing by and the lights that would shine into our windows. I kept noticing the lights until a light stayed on us and I didn't hear a car pass, then all I saw was blue and red lights. It was a park ranger, he asked how many of us were in the car, I said two, then I said three because of Toph. He told us we couldn't sleep off to the side of this highway, we told him our story and he told us he would just give us a warning. He was pretty cool.

Right before he left I asked him if he knew where we could sleep in our car and he actually told us of a pretty cool spot that was at the very bottom of the highway in Santa Cruz in a commercial area full of city buses. We ended up parking and sleeping there for the remainder of our time in Santa Cruz.