NOVEMBER 12
After another rather spectacular breakfast at the "Pacific Blue", we packed up the car and left Santa Cruz for what was going to be the "last leg" of our "Road Trip" heading back up the coast to San Francisco to spend the last couple of days of our holiday there before heading home on the evening flight to Heathrow on Friday evening.
Of course we'd barely got half a mile before we pulled over on West Cliff Drive to look at the rather magnificent view it offered of Santa Cruz Pier.
Having decided once again not to visit the Surfing Museum, we did, however pull into the "Twenty Minutes Maximum" Parking Lot overlooking the "Natural Bridges State Park" to look at a positive plethora of Pelicans as they perched on the rocks below, which turned out to be a place where twenty minutes would really never, ever be long enough, not least because of the strange interactions between the more elderly Car Park Regulars which appeared to be going on, as they strolled up to cars as if they were complete strangers, then hopped into the passenger seat as if they were old friends.
All probably very innocent, I'm sure, but then, in life generally, I've always been such an innocent that I'm usually the last to understand about any shenanigans that have been going on, when everyone else has "known about it for years..."
But I digress...
So, twenty minutes we were given, and twenty minutes we took, even though, towards the end of the time, I had to virtually drag the Beloved away from what had fast become her very favourite birds indeed, despite some last-minute Curlew spotting, and the vague sense that the Park Ranger over there in the booth taking money for the proper, all day, car park, didn't look as if he'd mind if we stayed longer.
There's always the troubling, and highly secret matter of those devious little "number plate recognition" systems to think about, though...
Still, it was the Pelicans that we most remember, and that huge cluster of them just sitting there, as far below them a huge cluster of humans went about their own, equally bizarre, pastimes, remains a strong and powerful memory of a morning that otherwise had us feeling fever so slightly melancholy as we came to terms with the sense of an ending approaching.
In fact, when we look back upon this fortnight, I suspect that, if we manage to recollect any of it at all, we really might start referring to it as our "Pelican Holiday..."
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