I had a pretty good Thanksgiving this year. I went down to Santa Cruz to see my folks, bringing Yoshi down with me, as it was his first real experience with the holiday. My family, friend, and I had the Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt and uncle's place. It was great to see the family again, as well as my good ol' friend, the Monterey Bay. It was also great to show Yoshi around where I grew up, pointing out things like "oh I used to play at that beach here," or "this is Scotts Valley; it's hella boring here," or "if you see red, white and blue signs that look like the French flag, that means that's a nudist beach."
All the good, quintessential Santa Cruz things like that.
It struck me while I was back there for the weekend and showing Yoshi around how much I really had missed the place of my birth and my home for my first 22 years. One of my prime motivations of going to UC Davis was because Davis wasn't Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz had become boring to me; I knew it too well, the people and culture were all familiar to me. Whatever edge and excitement people had when they think of the Cruz was lost to me, because it was old and dull to me. Been there, done that, so to say.
So after I graduated and got a degree from Cabrillo College, I had no desire to go to UC Santa Cruz. Let's just be honest here: UCSC isn't that great. Sure it's got its forests and meadows which people would die to have, plus good academics. But to borrow from Gertrude Stein, there is no there. All the colleges of the campus are separated from each other, meaning that there isn't really much of a single meeting place. Plus it's fairly physically removed from downtown Santa Cruz, which is where much of the life is. That's what appealed me to Davis; the campus was right next to downtown, and although it's a big school, it isn't chopped up and surgically dismembered like UCSC.
Plus, I also didn't want to go there because Santa Cruz was home, and always had been. I wanted something different, and Davis struck me as a place to have that.
So after going back to Santa Cruz for the Thanksgiving weekend, I have to admit that I actually began to miss it: the redwood forests, the Boardwalk, the Wharf, Pacific Avenue, the street musicians, the Bizerkely aroma. Now I've been back home before many times since transferring to Davis in September 2003. I think that it's just now that I think I'm beginning to have a little nostalgia for my old hometown.
But what the hell am I saying. Davis is an awesome place too. We got Sacramento and San Francisco not too far away, plus Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada are just less than two hours away. It's hardly a bad spot at all. I'm not complaining.
Over the weekend, I saw pretty much all of my immediate family in the Bay Area. I ate so much turkey that I think I gained a few pounds. Plus I did a lot of driving, showing my friend all over the place. The Pigeon Point Lighthouse was one of the highlights of our voyages around the region. It's a great, big, beautiful old lighthouse that has been there for over 130 years, standing on the edge of America, looking out at the changing mood of the Pacific Ocean. I took some photos here.
In the end, it was a great weekend.
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