Santa Cruz-in’

24 January 2010

Friday was Rani's birthday. Tuesday is Ingrid's. On Sunday, Alexis, Ingrid and I drove down to Santa Cruz and Rani drove up. We met late morning and spent the day on foot wandering.



I have been to Santa Cruz several times, but we saw wonderful places on this visit that I didn't know about.



We parked along the sea coast on West Cliff Drive, near the Natural Bridges State Beach. From there, we ambled along a pedestrian/cycling path that followed the coast line to the wharf.



We next headed inland to Pacific Avenue, a nice shopping street. We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant and topped off with cappuccinos and pastries at Lulu Carpenters. (Ingrid remembers this spot from many years past as making the "best cappuccinos this side of Venice (Italy)." That is a tough memory to live up to, but they were good this time, too!)



On the return, we found a city park built at the end of an abandoned railway with a few cars set up on the end of the tracks. After following the tracks for awhile, we meandered through residential neighborhoods to find our way back out to the coast. In all, we walked more than 11 miles.



The weather was great for a wintertime outing on the coast: chilly and heavily overcast, but with very little rain. The uniform sky light and the bright rain clothes made for nice coloring in the photos. Because of the low light, I did have some trouble with landscape shots getting a sufficient combination of strong depth of field, fast enough shutter speed and fine enough resolution (that is, a low enough ISO number) to capture well what I saw.



It was a great outing!