Days 9-12 of our Californian Road Trip visiting Santa Cruz.

Travel from Yosemite to Santa Cruz

We had a four hour drive reach Santa Cruz and we couldn’t find anywhere to stop on route so again I downloaded some geo-caches for us to find. We also needed somewhere to stop for lunch and saw a Cheesecake Factory that was located 30 minutes from Santa Cruz and decided that would be perfect. It was our first Cheesecake Factory since Florida and we all had our usuals (Cajan Chicken and mashed potatoes for me, chicken sliders for Izzy, Beef sliders for Tom and BBQ burger for Stu)

We did a quick supermarket shop and headed to our AirBnb which was a 5 minute drive from Santa Cruz boardwalk.

^{Our Airbnb in Santa Cruz – it was within walking distance to the board-walk but we always drove!}

Santa Cruz

It was a beautiful evening so we drove to the coast in order to get our bearings. The traffic was quite busy in the town but we saw there was a state park and we were able to park up and walk along the headlands. We saw some seals playing in the seaweed and also watched some surfers.

Monterey Bay

We had no idea how busy Monterey would be so woke up really early, made lunch and headed out (it was a 40 minute drive from our house). When we arrived it was really quiet! We wanted to hire bikes and cycle the Pacific Grove section of the Monterey Bay Coastal Trail so headed straight to the rental shop and chose 4 bikes.

One of the first bays we cycled passed had some elephant seals – you were not allowed to disturb them but you could watch from the path – although they were just lying in the sun!

^{We hadn’t seen elephant seals since we visited the Big Sur 4 years ago!}

The coastline was beautiful and there were loads of places to pull up and admire the view! We also saw loads of seals on all the rocks.

We cycled for about 1.5 hours and made it all the way to the Spanish Bay View Point before heading back. We returned the bikes and went for a wander around Monterey to buy some souvenirs and then headed home.

Santa Cruz Boardwalk

As Tom & Izzy had done everything we wanted to do we promised them a day on the boardwalk – which was full of rides and arcades. We bought them both ‘day tickets’ which meant they could go on all the rides as many times as they liked.

We arrived in Santa Cruz quite early so went for a walk along the pier. Half way along the pier there was a sealion viewing area and there were so many sea-lions! There were so noisy!

We then headed to the boardwalk for opening at 11am and stayed til about 5pm. Tom and Izzy definitely made the most of their passes by going on many of the rides twice.

We headed home for an earlyish night as we were off to San Francisco the next day.