Santa Cruz lifestyle

We've been greatly enjoying our time in Santa Cruz, even though our RV park is sucky.  No internet, no Verizon phone service, no DirecTV satellite access, no streaming video.  You'd think we were in some Mississippi backwoods.  Luckily they do offer decent cable TV, so we're able to follow what's going on in the world, I can watch the Warriors and Sharks, and Nancy can enjoy her Lifetime movies.  While here we're taking advantage of the medical, audiology, grooming, and optometry services we're familiar with from when we lived around here.

We had full-credit dinner at the home of dear old friends Mark and Nancy Wainer, and later visited Mark and Tingting Bright (who bought our house) at the old homestead in Ben Lomond.  We had dinner at the home of Don and Hilda Hodges, our oldest Santa Cruz friends, who we met at the apartments on Western Drive on the day we moved in there in 1975.  I attended a book club get-together I used to be part of.  Nancy had lunch with her friends Deanna and Marlene, and coffee the next day with Allan Hughes.  We attended our old buddy Ray Brown's excellent quintet concert at Kuumbwa and visited with Ray and his family there.

Downtown, with Vince and Joyce LoFranco we watched an excellent game that our Santa Cruz Warriors managed to lose in the last few seconds.

Jim and Cathy Helmer were our neighbors for many years in Ben Lomond, their home on the other side of a path through the woods from ours.  They had us up for dinner at their place and we had a great time reminiscing.  The next day Nancy and I attended an open house in Ben Lomond that Joyce and Gordon Rudy, the realtors who sold our house, threw for locals and clients.

We're still members of a dinner/gourmet club and had a delightful evening with lively political discussion at the Aptos home of Paula and Norbert Beneke with Laina Farhat and Micky Holzman.

Pat and Liz O'Grady, who we had visited during our road trip at their summer home in Maine, hosted us for dinner.  Their massive but incredibly sweet nearly-200-pound Newfoundland, a show-stopper wherever they go, was a perfect gentleman, as always.

I know this makes for boring reading for everyone except Nancy and me, but this blog serves as the diary for our travels, and a posting like this helps convince us that we really did have a life when we lived in Ben Lomond.