I took the Highway 17 express bus across the mountains from near the San Jose State campus, through downtown, and over the mountains to the Pacific coast town of Santa Cruz (while the Presbyterian Youth Advisory delegates took a charter bus to the boardwalk/amusement park at Santa Cruz). The bus stopped a small bus station next to downtown Santa Cruz , and my friends Rachel and Chris (a former Santa Cruz mayor key to the town’s tough on growth policies) met me (sans children – in Berkeley at their aunt’s and at violin day camp) and we walked through the downtown and had Mexican food. It was cold last night. Santa Cruz is a mix of hippies and upscale businesses and beach that is unique. We walked by two downtown movie theaters, a local independent bookstore that outsells the borders, a restaurant that Chris and Rachel are preventing from getting a liquor license, and then up the hill to the 1850s house that Rachel and Chris (and presumably Rachel’s parents – who some 7 or 8 years ago sold a start-up computer business they had nurtured – and bought the Berkeley paper) had bought four years ago.
The owners before Chris and Rachel had renovated the cool house where Chris and Rachel, Sophia, Isabel, their dog (for whom they spent some $4,000 to rehab from a serious back injury), their lizard Norman, their rabbit, and their two cats live (they transfer two sheep to Rachel’s grandmother’s old farm). (When I last visited – some four years ago – Rachel and Chris and family lived between downtown and the boardwalk on a little alley and next to a hill very near the beach – Jet-lagged, I used to get up early in the morning and walk to the then deserted boardwalk/amusement park where the Youth Advisory delegates were that night. Although Chris rode to a City Commission seat partly in the aftermath of a successful effort to block the addition of a street light at a corner their old neighborhood, with increasing crime Rachel said they couldn’t justify exposing their children to this – plus their sheep, one of whom a neighborhood dog killed).
I got to bed earlier than usual after watching the Oakland A’s defeat the Phillies and taking a look at Chris and Rachel’s wedding photos. In the morning after a quick shower and tea, Rachel and I drove back out of town, up the mountain on Highway 17, and down the mountain into San Jose (in only 35 minutes – in time for an early morning breakfast where one of my colleagues’ book was discussed and where I got to talk with my old Tallahassee pastor). I was to meet Rachel at the San Jose campus for lunch.
The owners before Chris and Rachel had renovated the cool house where Chris and Rachel, Sophia, Isabel, their dog (for whom they spent some $4,000 to rehab from a serious back injury), their lizard Norman, their rabbit, and their two cats live (they transfer two sheep to Rachel’s grandmother’s old farm). (When I last visited – some four years ago – Rachel and Chris and family lived between downtown and the boardwalk on a little alley and next to a hill very near the beach – Jet-lagged, I used to get up early in the morning and walk to the then deserted boardwalk/amusement park where the Youth Advisory delegates were that night. Although Chris rode to a City Commission seat partly in the aftermath of a successful effort to block the addition of a street light at a corner their old neighborhood, with increasing crime Rachel said they couldn’t justify exposing their children to this – plus their sheep, one of whom a neighborhood dog killed).
I got to bed earlier than usual after watching the Oakland A’s defeat the Phillies and taking a look at Chris and Rachel’s wedding photos. In the morning after a quick shower and tea, Rachel and I drove back out of town, up the mountain on Highway 17, and down the mountain into San Jose (in only 35 minutes – in time for an early morning breakfast where one of my colleagues’ book was discussed and where I got to talk with my old Tallahassee pastor). I was to meet Rachel at the San Jose campus for lunch.
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