Saturday Debbi and I drove down to Santa Cruz, more-or-less on a whim. I thought it would be fun to go to the Beach Boardwalk to play mini golf on their indoor course (which we’d never played before).
Unfortunately, everyone else decided to go to Santa Cruz on the beautiful sunny day, too.
For the most part this wasn’t a problem: We hit a little traffic heading out of Silicon Valley, and some more when we reached Route 1 in Santa Cruz, but it was entirely bearable. Then we bludgeoned our way through the city to the waterfront.
And stopped completely a mere two blocks from the parking lot.
Now it’s not that the parking lot was full, in fact when we finally got there there were several spaces available, and we got a good one. No, the problem is that it too twenty-five minutes to drive those last two blocks, from one end of the lot to the entrance at the other end. I think it was the cross-traffic driving along the edge of the beach that was slowing things down, not letting people in from our direction. It was nuts. I was able to force my way around the last corner and then we finally got to the lot and parked, thank goodness.
Sheesh, next time we’ll leave in the morning, rather than after lunch. Or better yet, wait for an overcast day.
Once there, we had a good time. We did play mini golf: It’s a fun course, with three holes indoors with glow-in-the-dark decor. The course had more twists and turns than the other courses I’ve played around here, reminding me more of the courses I played with my Dad around the Boston area. I liked it.
We bought soft serve ice cream, then walked along the boardwalk and gawked. We didn’t feel like going on any rides, but we enjoyed the sun and also bought a funnel cake (a.k.a. “fried dough” as I always think of it) and some shaved ice (one of the few things I miss from my days in New Orleans, and yet another motivation to want to return to Hawaii). Somehow we completely forgot to play video games in the arcasde. On the other hand, I don’t really need further evidence of how far my Robotron skills have fallen.
A nice jaunt, all in all, but man, that traffic!