Santa Cruz, California - July 5th & 6th

After our lovely night’s sleep on the way back from Yosemite, we headed to Santa Cruz, the birthplace of the wetsuit, to check out the coast and the surf. There are heaps of surf shops in Santa Cruz (and heaps of people too it turns out, although it was still the long weekend with great weather, so hardly unexpected!). Having not really thought ahead again we couldn’t find anywhere close to stay, so managed to get a spot in an RV park/campground in the nearby state forest at Felton, which was nice and much quieter!

We spent a fair bit of time watching people surfing at ‘Steamer Lane’, where they hold the Coldwater Classic surfing competition – there’s some pretty impressive surfing in Santa Cruz it seems, although there weren’t too many waves when we were there...

Lawrie managed to pick up a cheap secondhand surfboard at one of the local shops, and was pretty impressed with it! As well as a ridiculously cheap priced wetsuit at a local surf outlet, which was great! (yes, another wetsuit…!)

So this might have been where Lawrie’s holiday really started – much of our time in Santa Cruz was spent with Lawrie surfing, at ‘The Hook’ and ‘Pleasure Point’ – there aren’t really many beach breaks for surfing in the area, but stairs down from small cliffs next to the water, so a bit different to home!

Surfing at 'The Hook'

Tons of surfers at Pleasure Point

Steamer Lane

Surfing Museum (tiny) next to Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz

We also headed down to the local boardwalk and wharf, which was absolutely jampacked with people (long weekend, etc etc, but also the boardwalk has a mini theme park with a bunch of rides and games arcades, so it’s a pretty popular spot – we didn’t hang out there for too long!)