Wednesday of our California trip was what we planned for the oldest and most significant park. It was the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Or, to use the name that got the most immediate recognition from my coworkers, ``the amusement park they use in the movie The Lost Boys. No, the vampires one, not the Peter Pan one''. I'm not sure there is a Peter Pan one but my coworker thought there was so, all right, I'll go along with it not being that.
This was also going to be our longest drive to a single park, so we thought that we would be getting up early enough to grab a breakfast meal from whatever fast-food place was conveniently nearby. When I pulled up to a McDonald's or Whatever I did ask whether they were still serving breakfast and got a confusing answer like ``yes, we're on the lunch menu now''. The breakfast menu has stuff we can eat, like McMuffins without the meat, but you can't do anything with a meatless Big Mac. So we gave up on that and went to a bagel place nearby that we had to go inside for, eating up more time than a drive-through would have been. But never mind (I may have confused which day this was anyway); the beach boardwalk would be open all the way until ... 9 pm. Yes, that seems early to us too. But the only night the boardwalk was going to be open late that week was the 4th of July. I assume it's a staffing shortage because why else would a seaside park close at 9 pm even on a Friday night in early summer? (But if it's only staff hours, why not start an hour or two later in the day?)
The drive to Santa Cruz started, of course, with highways, particularly with 101, a road ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's navigator wanted us to take everywhere. This also took me on my first encounter with a thing I've heard about, the highway on-ramps with traffic signals, although the traffic was light enough or the time of day low enough that they weren't on. (We never did see them on.) And as we got closer to the shore it all felt more and more like driving to the Jersey Shore, particularly towns like Seaside Heights or Wildwood. You know, the regular pace of highway and local major road and town and suburb giving way to smaller, older roads that cling to the coast instead of the north-south arteries. City grids that are these smashed-up decorative plates, with two- and three-storey buildings that might be restaurants or motels or bars or event halls all jumbled together. Well-market-tested chain signs giving way to hand-painted signs and neon tubing. This was a new place to us, but its vernacular we knew.
Let's have a little more Cedar Point time that Monday back in June when we went and it was busier than we expected ...
More ducks, including one that seems a bit disheveled there. You'll see.
Oh wait, first, ooooh but that hind foot stretch, right? The swan went around a while with their foot held like this. Hope it felt good and not, like, they had a Charley horse.
Yeah so here's that disheveled duck, who seems to have had to just throw their feathers on and get to work in a hurry.
Uh-oh, they heard me say that and now are angry with me.
Well, let's get to safety. In a relocated cabin originally built something like 190 years ago the candle shop has been merged with the wood carving shop, and set under the watch of the wood carver who's been too busy with candle stuff to spend more than a couple hours wood-carving all season (as of Juneteenth).
Love that sea serpent, though, and emerging from the wood floor makes it only better.
Trivia: Before the beginning of the school year in 1937 the District of Columbia's school system announced the student lunch program was out of money and would have to be curtailed. Though Washingtonians formed a number of fundraising organizations and programs, the federal government, with complete control of the budget, did not provide more money. Source: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put The Nation To Work, Nick Taylor. Incidentally in a moment of ``so near to getting it'', in March 1935 Rufus S Lusk, speaking for the Washington Taxpayers' Protective Association, complained that ``if free school lunches should be furnished, why not clothes and shoes?''
Currently Reading: The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Thomas Hine.
