My parents wave me off at 6:00 this morning. It was a great trip ... Lincoln has really changed since I left in '89, but one thing remains: the people are still cool. And my father is the only one (besides me) who can make Travellin' Tom talk to others.I touch down in Santa Cruz later that afternoon, and Stephanie Matt is there to meet me. Steph is the sister of my buddy-and-co-worker Jessica Matt. Steph has one year left on her Psych degree at UC-Santa Cruz.
If you know the Matts at all, you know some things are burned into their DNA. That infamous shoulder-shrug-with-eye-roll that says "Hee hee, I'm a bad girl." A love of kareoke. Their great sense of humor. And the punctutation of "Yay!" throughout a conversation. Steph has all that, just as the next generation of Matts (Jessica's daughter Rhiannon) do.
Steph and I begin by surveying the coast, and getting a freakin' huge burrito at the local taquaraita. I had a cactus one. It was excellent! The green strips of cactus, which looked like french-cut green beans were tasty, and (fortunately) fileted of all spikes beforehand. I washed it down with a Squirt grapefruit soda. Ahhhh! My love of California has begun.
It's impossible to describe the enormity of a redwood, so Travellin' Tom will serve as a reference point. (See right). Evidently the redwood is thousands of years older too. These trees have personality. Some are very linear, others have knobbed, curly, warted bases and trunks that branch out like petals. Most were scarred with moss or lightning strikes.
I am awed, but Steph is all ho-hum. She is much more excited by her clever plan to park in the free lot, saving the $7 fee by jumping a couple of fences and train couplers. "Stick it to the man! I go where where I want!" becomes her constant motto. She is the consummate Californian, no matter where her life will take her next.
Next stop (cue fanfare) : The Mystery Spot! We are full of anticipation. What is the mystery? What secrets will it yield? And would life become merely anti-climactic afterwards?
Thankfully no. The Mystery Spot was a shack built diagonally into a hill ... as if the shack had slid down in a mudslide and stopped halfway. Inside the shack, things looked a little off-center. You could stand on the edge of a table and lean out over the floor without falling. You could push a suspended pendulum forward but not backward. You could line up a group of people from smallest to largest, then reverse their order and they look the same height. Our tour guide gave us three possible explanations: Aliens, CO2, or Magnets. (Optical illusions? No. That would actually make sense.)
Does this sound like The Cosmos in the Black Hills (http://www.cosmosmysteryarea.com/)? Hmmmmmm? But no! It is the Mystery Spot! And we blame everything unexpected on it. Suddenly the universe made sense.
Stephanie's love interest, Mark, joins us for mojitos and fusion cuisine at El Palomar. The mojitos there have so much mint, they look like a tree submerged upside down in rum and lime juice. Mmmmm.
We hit the Boardwalk, where they have free Friday night concerts all summer long. Ray Parker Juinor is that night. Right now you're thinking, "Who You Gonna Call? Ghostbusters!" and he does close his set with that. But I remember him in the band Raydio - "You Can't Change That", "The Other Woman," and "Jack and Jill." He's an excellent guitarist, and his backing band was stellar, including Ollie Brown on the drums. I sit on the beach with Steph and Mark, squishing the sand between our toes, and passing between us a water bottle of Crown Royal and sugar free ginger ale.
We go to the Red Room, where I drink Dewars (one of the sponsors for my vacation ... it would seem). The place is packed with beautiful people, and it feels oddly amazingly wonderful to be close to them. Steph likes to people-watch, and I am starting to like it too. The truth is ... I had never really liked crowds until the last few years. Now I can feel energy it. Very Californian. Energy flows through everything.
We end the day at 1:30 with Crown Royal cocktails, and I fall asleep on a nice comfortable cot as the breeze wafts over an expensive Santa Cruz balcony.
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