Santa Cruz

Laziness, a sense of finally being back home, and a touch of travel fatigue are the best explanations for why it's been so long since I added a new post to this blog.

As I mentioned before, there were no reservations available in RV parks around here for the days surrounding Thanksgiving.  Our friends Jen and Sammy found a very generous neighbor of theirs in Scotts Valley with a large graveled area just behind his home, and we parked the motorhome there and moved into the home of Linda Lord, who is on a scuba diving vacation in Mexico and offered to let us plop down there with Sophia and Tammy Faye while she's gone.

We drove down to the Santa Cruz Garden Mall and walked along what we've decided is one of the coolest shopping neighborhoods in the country.  It was kind of exciting to walk into the Santa Cruz bookstore, which was there before we came to town lo those many years ago.

If you look closely you'll see a street musician next to that iconic sculpture of a famous saw player outside the bookshop.  That guy wasn't great but a couple of other street performers that day were first class.

It still saddens us to observe that the Cooper House, a lovely, massive, and distinctive brick building, is no longer there.  Damaged in the 1989 earthquake, it was torn down - unnecessarily, I suspect - and replaced with a conventional commercial building.  Progress, you know.  Before that, a very good jazz band - called "Warm", I believe - played almost daily in the front patio of the Cooper House surrounded by an outdoor lunch crowd and the street passersby.  Santa Cruz was even more magical in those days.

I took this back-home opportunity to make various dental and medical visits among providers I know.  Those important maintenance checkups are not so easy when you're traveling in unfamiliar lands, which has been our situation for the past year.

I had a nasty episode of high fevers, chills, and body aches which necessitated a bit of medical workup but seems to have been one of those many unnamed viral illnesses - not the flu - lurking about.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with Mark and Nancy Wainer, bought a car, and have a number of dinners and get-togethers with friends scheduled for the coming weeks.  We'll be moving back to Smithwoods RV Park in Felton in a couple of days, and then on December 9 will drive to one of our favorite campgrounds, in one of our favorite areas - Napa Valley - for a wild week of wine and food.

Return to the motherland

Driving west from Las Vegas, we stayed one night in Barstow, and one night in Bakersfield.  It occurred to me that a first-time traveler heading to California on this route through the desert must have been saying, "This is the magical land of opportunity?  Where are the surfer babes?"

At least Barstow had a nice sunset.

Finally the terrain began looking familiar as we moved between rolling hills and beside vineyards and approached Paso Robles.  We stayed there for three nights in a nice campground we'd used before.  We enjoyed a casual dinner at Pappy McGregor's and especially were impressed with a glass of Tolosa No-oak Chardonnay.

The next day we drove to the Tolosa Winery on the other side of San Luis Obispo, and sitting outside on their patio adjacent to the fields of grape vines, we did a tasting of Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs.  Suddenly we felt that we were back in the California of our dreams.  The Chardonnays were very good and one of the Pinot Noirs was in the running for the best example of that wine we'd ever tasted.  Sixty-five dollars for the bottle, but we laugh at expense.  We'll save it for a special occasion, such as the next time we eat dinner.

We took the opportunity to explore the town of San Luis Obispo a bit further.  It has a charming downtown with many interesting restaurants.  SLO was named the happiest town in America a few years ago (Santa Cruz, I believe, also held the title for a year.)  The wonderful Cal Poly University is there, and most of the throngs on the streets of downtown were young college students.  We could see ourselves choosing worse places to live.

And so finally, after very nearly a year on the road, we returned to Santa Cruz.  Our campground is Smithwood's RV Park in Felton, which is under beautiful redwood trees but has the disadvantage of no Verizon service and no in-camp WiFi, so we have no internet service.  How did anyone survive before Al Gore invented the internet?  One consequence of that is that I've been unable to post blog entries for several days.  I'm writing this now in the clinic's Scotts Valley parking lot after my pulmonary emboli followup appointment with my primary care physician, Dr. Jim Telfer.

Incidentally, Tammy Faye, our little dog with the splenic hemangiosarcoma, seems to be doing okay, except that she has spells of loud coughing during the night that last up to an hour straight, making it difficult for human sleep.  Last evening Nancy gave her some drops that supposedly are derived from the marijuana plant, and she slept right through, more or less.

Our current problem is that our campground reservations extend only through Thursday, and all the campgrounds are full through Thanksgiving weekend.  Our friend Linda Lord has generously offered to let us stay at her home, but we have to find a place to store the motorhome for several days or a week.  I suppose we could park it near Costco with the other motorhomes there, if that's still allowed, but somehow that doesn't seem to be the smartest idea I've ever come up with.

Halloween in Sin City

Downtown Las Vegas is historic Las Vegas, the site of two of the oldest casinos in the city - El Cortez and the Golden Nugget, both of which are still operating - and the first Las Vegas hotel.  It's several blocks of amazing excess, bright as day in the middle of the night.  The Fremont Street Experience is a four-block-long pedestrian mall there of restaurants, stores, and music stages, all covered by a barrel vault LED canopy of absolutely enormous size, billed as the largest video screen in the world, on which spectacular light shows are played nightly.

A Halloween celebration was scheduled there, and party animals that Nancy and I are, we couldn't miss it.  It was crowded, with lots of street performers competing for the partygoers' generosity.

Many of our fellow attendees were in costume.  We came as a couple of hicks from California.

Some of the women were scantily clad.  I spied the first pasties I'd seen since my misspent youth as a medical student in New Orleans.  Three live bands played, with the sound level cranked up to painful.  As the evening wore on the crowds became like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, meaning that moving through them was a painstakingly slow process.  An assault on the senses, but fun.

Downtown Las Vegas is also the site of the Mob Museum, a very well done exhibit about gangs and famous criminals and organized crime in America, with emphasis on its Las Vegas manifestation.  Here I am in a model of the electric chair in Sing Sing.

It's surprising and a bit embarrassing how many famous criminals we are familiar with - from John Dillinger to Lucky Luciano to the late great Whitey Bulger and many many more.  Certainly we remember more crooks than political figures from those times.  We probably have Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola and other great filmmakers to thank for our obsession with history's bad boys.

The first luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was the Flamingo, built by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who fell into financial difficulty and began skimming off the top, which led to Meyer Lansky and his fellow investors (allegedly) having him whacked.  Many of the hotel/casinos were mob-connected through most of the city's history but the gambling industry is better regulated today.

The slide motor parts for our motorhome arrived today, and Jeff the mobile RV mechanic made our slide functional, so starting on Sunday we're on our way back toward Santa Cruz.  Hooray!  We stayed in Las Vegas ten days, much longer than originally planned.  It's an interesting place, to say the least, but we're ready to move on.