WHERE I'M FROM

I don't post pictures too frequently, as I am essentially a lazy computer-er and they take time to load, but I have been missing home and decided to show you where I'm from.

I was born in Santa Clara, California and we moved when I was two to Watsonville, California.


This is my parents house, which my mother has landscaped and cultivated for twenty plus years and it is pretty stunning. I didn't live here until I was four or so--before that we lived in a cabin on this same property with no electricity. I was a little farm girl.






This is the treeline street, as we called it when I was little and the trees were much more numerous--so close that their branches touched and it was like walking down a pine wall. On the other side of this hill is the beach.





This is the newer walkway that has been put in in between the houses but you can still get down the beach on the huge cement hill. This is my home beach, called Sand Dollar Beach (and you can find tons of Sand Dollars there at certain times). It's an okay beach for surfing but nothing spectacular.






This is a view of Watsonville. It is an agricultural town based mainly on things like strawberries, artichokes, and most other vegetables and fruit you can imagine.





Watsonville is part of Santa Cruz County, officially Surf City USA (we won out against Huntington Beach).



This is Seacliff Beach with a pier and a cement ship that was dragged here half a century ago and is now being battered to pieces by the Pacific ocean. This is a good beach for kids when the muck warnings aren't up, because there are hardly ever any big waves.




The inventor of the wetsuit, Jack O'Neill is from our town and every once in awhile you'll still see him riding around town on a bike with an eye patch. So, surfing is a big deal in our town but, no, I don't surf. I'm too afraid of sharks and honey, we've got sharks. Every few years there's a Great White scare coming up the coast and we always have smaller tiger sharks out and about. Santa Cruz is at the northern tip of the Monterey Bay, which has one of the (if not the) deepest drop-offs in the world. Therefore there is the Internationally acclaimed Monterey Bay Aquarium full of strange fish most people have never seen before. It's built in an old cannery in downtown Monterey and you can just see Steinbeck wandering the roads looking for his stories (he loved nearby Salinas and made his home there).


This is one of the beautiful tanks that hold three stories of fish and seaweed. It is one of the most beautiful and mesmerizing things I have ever seen and if I didn't have a little one tugging on me to see the otters, I'd stay here for hours. The seaweed stalks tower dozens of feet into the air and sway back and forth while fish you'd never thought you'd see wander past the glass and eye you with an unworried face. They've seen slack-jawed humans before.






This is Adam's parents' house in Soquel, which lies right in the middle between downtown Santa Cruz and Watsonville. Adam grew up in Soquel and we loved living there after we were married. Adam's parents built this house when he was 8, and it is a lovely Victorian farmhouse where you can just sit in the wicker porch swing and look out at the bay.






This is our famous Boardwalk, with one of the oldest wooden roller coasters around. You can see it there in the white and red. It's called the Giant Dipper. We love our boardwalk with its sticky cement, fried goods smells, and ever changing assortment of amusement park rides.





This is Adam and the kids on our last trip to the boardwalk last summer. They won't go on the Giant Dipper yet, but we're working on it. I have yet to try a deep-fried twinkie but these are also here.






If the day is too warm, you can head inland to Nisene Marks State Park, another world famous landmark filled with gorgeous redwood trees that tower hundreds of feet into the air.





This is Capitola-By-The-Sea or just Capitola if you aren't trying to sell really expensive knick-knacks. It is our tourist town with a pretty wharf, really expensive shops, and people from all over the world wander in wearing white shorts and loud tennis-club tops with visors. The nice thing is you can still get good food down here cheap.





This is my mom holding Mercy and standing next to Calvin on the last day we got to go to Sand Dollar before moving to Scotland. It was hard to say goodbye and I've been missing my parents so I put this one in. I love it and it reminds me of the Black Stallion when Alec and the horse are on the deserted island and the sun is setting.






My Dad holding Mercy. I miss my Dad.






I love this picture. My dad is running with my kids. A year and a half ago he could barely walk from his chair to his bed and now he's running with them! Thank you Lord for answering our prayer and giving my father a new heart!





This is Seacliff beach again. Far across the bay you can see the mountains rising up behind Seaside and out on the tip the beginnings of Monterey itself. At night the little lights twinkle on both sides of the bay but out in front stretches the big bold Pacific with nothing to stop you if you went adventuring.






My mom and Mercy running on our beach.





Calvin on a trip with Adam when they went to another state park, Henry Cowell, and camped.





This is another view of Capitola. You can see the bridge and the restaurants behind them nestled next to the outlet of the river.





This is a view of the Santa Cruz mountains with Santa Cruz down in the hazy distance. You can get all things in one day from redwoods and mountains to seashore and dunes.





This is downtown Santa Cruz, one of the self-professed weirdest towns around. It is hippy-ville despite its nice shops and many homeless people congregate here.






I'll leave you with this last one of Big Sur. Highway 1 runs all along the coast of California and just half an hour down from us is this most beautiful site. It is something you should try to get to at least once in your lifetime. The views and drive are some of the most beautiful on the planet.

So, this is a few pictures of where I'm from. I'd post more but I don't have any and I'm getting sleepy. But we love our town and will call it home even if we never quite get back there. Both our families are there and the sixteen years with Adam (now minus one) have all been spent there. We're six hours from L.A. (a trip we do about every other year to go to Disneyland), an hour from San Francisco, and minutes from every kind of landscape you could ask for.
Thanks for reading,
Rachel