Santa Cruz

    In my time of sitting blogging in ole San Francisco, my car got towed.  I got it back for a hefty fee, and decided I needed to get out of the city.  I drove south to Half Moon Bay, and camped on a back road.  In the morning I headed for the little city of Santa Cruz, a hip college/surf town.  Once there, I skated to downtown to check it out, then saw the boardwalk full of people riding rollercoasters.  On my way up the beach I met a German man who was bicycling up the 1.  He said the wind was strong and he wished he had started in the north and rode south.  He was headed for Vancouver, and had been on a boat in Panama with a friend working.  He told me to keep travelling, and then I made my way up the beach back towards my car.  At one of the beach parking spots I spotted three kids chilling under a tree, one playing guitar.  I said hello and we became friends immediately.  Noah is from Maryland, Angie from Delaware, and Teo from So. California.  So the four of us, all from different walks of life, hung out the rest of the day, talking on the shore and playing music downtown.  We met a kid that looked like our friend Sacco, only he was my age.  He talked constantly and had stories of jumping trains, working on boats around the world, and the Rainbow Gatherings.  He was a juggalo, his name Gypsy, and very intense.  After enough of downtown, we ate a grateful bowl of beans rice and kale all for donation.  At the bottom of the bowl were the words, "What are you grateful for?".  We were all fed for not much money, and then we ended up back at the ocean.  There we started talking to Bobnoxious, a talkative ex Navy Seal who turned out to show us something very interesting.  Over the edge of the cliff between the ocean and the bluff, he showed us a little cave that he lived in for years.  The moonlight shone into the cave, and reflected off the water beautifully.  The sound of the crashing waves shook the ground.  He told us about some neighborhood kids who were brainwashed by their parents to not like him and his lifestyle of living in a cave, so they bombed the caves with fireworks.  THey must have been big mortars because the cave was charred black and all the stuff that was in there had burned up, leaving melted objects and metal all laying in a heap.  He had started to live there again, and showed us that the whole cave was studded with crystals.  He shone his flashlight into one of the rocks, and the rock glowed after the light was off.  He had another cave down the shore he called the evacuation cave, which had also been "nuked", as he called it.  He was very talkative, and reminded me of my friend Justin.  Then there was a drunk there who mumbled and sang, until Bob yelled at him to shut up or he would kill him, but he never shut up and we left, with the drunk following us begging for cigarettes.  We went down the beach to a field, where we ducked into a grove with a small dry creek bed and slept, watching the moonlight through the interwoven branches and leaves.  All night we heard the crashing of waves, and also the occasional sea lion barking.  Upon walking into the dark grove Noah fell into the small ditch, and slept there for the night, thinking it was softest.  We all woke late and cooked pancakes, enjoying another sunny California day.