Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is a lovely central coastal city located at the North end of the Monterey Bay, 1h30 drive-ride south of San Francisco. It can be divided mainly in two parts, the beach front and the downtown with between the third Avenue. If you never read a thing about Santa Cruz, I can bet that you will be surprised to see the big attraction/amusement park that boards the beach (it is almost on the sand) with its roller coasters, its haunted house and its huge arcade rooms! Indeed, Santa Cruz is well known for its Boardwalk Park (the name of the attraction park) which offers a lot of distraction for the tourists and locals. It has the 6th oldest roller coaster of the United-States, the Giant Dipper, painted in red and white. It is a wooden coaster that is 0.5 miles long. You will see it from anywhere on the beach as it is the biggest structure of the park and the city itself. The fares are not too expensive, from 3$ to 5$, 5$ being the price for the biggest attractions. There are also a lot of shopping stores in the park, and fast-food and candy stores to feed the hungriest tourists. You will also find a very attractive mini-golf, and a bunch of arcade games for very cheap.


Once the surprise of the Boardwalk Park gone, you will admire the very nice (and kind of long) beach of Santa Cruz, which faces South (no sunset on the beach unfortunately). On the right side of the beach there is a long wharf which has, like the 39th Pier of San Francisco, a lot of restaurants (a little bit expensive) and tourist stores to buy all kind of souvenirs.


I only visited the beach front and the downtown, so I cannot tell what there is around Santa Cruz (I didn't see for instance the University of California Santa Cruz). The downtown is pretty lovely and typical I thought of the coastal cities of California. It boards the Pacific Avenue for 2 miles, but it is not really big neither interesting.

Santa Cruz is quite small, and I think a one-day stand is enough to visit the city, even if you plan on spending all your money at the Boardwalk Park. Every Friday, there are also free concerts of old Rock bands that gather all the population during 3 hours. The people start to take their seat on the beach at 4:00PM while the concert starts at 6:30PM.