Last week, I was in Silicon Valley for work. Our offices there moved from San Jose to a new building in Mountain View and it was my first time at that location – the building/campus is pretty nice! However, the general lifestyle is still the same so that was rather boring. One day, I decided to drive around after work but after the sun went down (i.e., 8pm) there wasn’t a lot I could do/see because the area doesn’t believe in street lights.
I wasn’t happy with that so I went back to the hotel to see what else I could do after work. Looking at the map, I was surprised that Santa Cruz was actually quite close! The next day, I was able to make it out of work early (5:30) and made the drive down. Even with San Jose rush hour traffic, I was able to get there in about 1h20m.
Once you get out of the San Jose area, there’s a really interesting drive up and down over mountains, trees on both sides, lots of S-turns throughout, and a relatively high speed (50+ mph speed limit). I don’t think you can actually go at the posted speed limit for some parts. It was almost worth it to go just for that drive!
I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in Santa Cruz as I had to make it back to my hotel that night. I checked out a beach, walked along the wharf and had dinner there. Foursquare didn’t have a strong opinion so I chose Stagnaro Brothers which seemed ok.
There weren’t a lot of tourists there at that time, but I had some difficulty finding parking. There was a lot of metered parking, which was $1.50/hr. I didn’t know how long I was going to be there and didn’t have that much change. You could also pay online, but after I downloaded the app, signed up for an account and attached my PayPal account – it turns out that at that location I could only pay by Visa/Mastercard…!!! Instead of doing that I decided to drive around some more. Most of the parking was paid under that scheme, but I found a large lot near the Boardwalk where you get a ticket and pay after. Luckily, after dinner when I was leaving, it seemed like they were offering free parking so I didn’t have to pay at all!
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