Category Archives: Santa Cruz

Motorcycles, Ride Reports, Santa Cruz, YouTube

Riding the California Coast – Pacific Coast Highway (17-NOV-2013)

18 November 2013 David Leave a comment

If you ride a motorcycle, and have never been to California, you are truly missing out on one of the best places in the United States to ride a motorcycle. PERIOD.

Here a few photos from various places along a ride I took yesterday from Santa Cruz, CA, to Lucia,CA:

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Being an MC ride, there are few opportunities along the way to take photos, but amongst the group we did mange to snap off a few.

We first gathered here at Lighthouse Harbor Grille in Moss Landing:

We met up with the remainder of the group in Carmel.

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We gassed up the bikes and prepared ourselves (with more caffeine of course) for what was about to transpire. Rich (on the 916) took the time to model his man-sack for us. I hear it’s last word in manly riding apparel for the Central Coast.

From here on our, it was Ride like the Wind all the way to Lucia. We did stop once to regroup, turn on the video cameras and discuss the awesomeness so far:

The first of many great surprises on this ride, was our lunch destination in Lucia. Ah.. what a view! What a great place to relax after a spirited ride up Hwy 1.

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Return ride Video:

Next stop. Nepenthe in Big Sur. Despite a hair raising incident with an inattentive tourist in a rental car, we made it there without obvious injury. Despite the fact that the highway was the destination and the star of the day, this pulled off a pretty convincing 2nd place.:

What a fantastic ride today. Perfectly organized (or properly disorganized?) group. It’s always a blast to right with these guys and gals. Looking forward to our next epic excursion!!

PS. Video will be added to the blog as soon as I can clear 132 GB of space on a computer, somewhere.

Santa Cruz, Technology, YouTube

Dash Cam Test Run – Santa Cruz to SJC, CA

14 January 2013 David 1 Comment

Sunday afternoon, I mounted my new $25 dash cam (purchased 2 of them from Amazon, $25 each to my door, I figured why not!) inside the windshield of my 2002 BMW ///M3 Convertible, and drove from Santa Cruz to San Jose (SJC airport) California.

Highway 17, has earned this dubious distinction as the most dangerous highway in California. With it’s steep decent from it’s 1800′ Santa Cruz Mountains summit to the Santa Clara Valley Floor below, it’s often this site of injury and fatality crashes.

Audio in the clip is horrible, and unedited. Wind noise due to the top on car being down, plus the fact I was wasting no time on “The Hill“.

While growing up in “The Valley”, heading over the hill to Santa Cruz always seemed like such a journey. Families would pack up food and drink to make it over the mountain. In reality, it’s a fairly short dive (about 20 miles) but back in the 70’s when I grew up, summer time temps well into the 90’s, combined with the fairly steep ascent to the summit (at 1800′) meant there was a pretty good chance you’d be taking a break in one of the turnouts while the car’s radiator cooled off enough to continue the drive. Using A/C on the hill was basically an impossibility, unless you enjoyed being temporarily stranded on the side of the highway while possibly awaiting a tow hook.

As I grew older, cars were built better, and I was able to afford these better cars, the drive to the beach became less and less an practice of gambling upon one’s luck, and simply being able to afford a 1/2 tank of gas on a high school or college student’s budget.

photography, Santa Cruz, Sports, travel

Steamer Lane Surfing Pics – Santa Cruz, CA

22 December 2012 David Leave a comment

Between storms, the waves really picked up at Steamers Lane, Santa Cruz, CA.

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Steamer’s Lane has a rich surfing history. It is just off a point on the side of cliffs in the West Cliff residential area near downtown Santa Cruz, providing a good opportunity to view the surfing. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum is in the lighthouse there. “Steamer Lane” is the preferred form of the name used by the locals. It was at Steamer Jack O’Neil invented the modern surfing wetsuit, “Just because he wanted to surf longer”.

I went out to capture some of the Saturday action:

photography, Santa Cruz, travel

Pacific Storm slams Santa Cruz, CA

2 December 2012 David Leave a comment

It was an ugly, ugly morning in Santa Cruz.

Following almost a week of non-stop unsettled weather, Mother Nature decided to give us a little reminder of how insignificant and inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of things.

Obviously, this is nothing like the horrid disaster of Hurricane Sandy, but and angry sea, is, an angry see.

Here are some photos takes along West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz on the 2nd of December. The sunlight was a horrible blue from the deep clouds and reflection out of the ocean. I did the best I could do on the color correction: