Santa Cruzin' for Love and History! - The Bill Beaver Project

More 2023 Adventures

San Jose, CA → Santa Cruz, CA → San Jose, CA
118.0 mi (189.9 km)

More 2023 Adventures

Oh hi there, everyone!

I haven’t made a trip to northern California in quite a while, but a lot has happened since then! The California Office of Historic Preservation has added more historical landmarks to the list, meaning the quest I thought was completed just got extended! Plus, my very good friends, Matt & Leanna, are getting hitched this week, so there was no reason not to head up north for a few days. This time, though, I took a plane. This beaver’s getting too old for overnight MEGABUS.

I headed west from San Jose, passing places I hadn’t seen for ten years, like the Woodside Store, San Gregorio, and First Congregational Church of Pescadero until I reached the sunny, but very, very windy coast to see what had been added to the list!

Back in January of 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic kicked in, the State Historical Resources Commission made some big changes to sites that were previously just associated with Gaspar de Portolá! Now seven old landmarks and two new landmarks make up the Ohlone-Portolá Heritage Trail, featuring more information about the Ohlone people that this expedition encountered! I started off at Bean Hollow (#1059), where the expedition noted that the beach pebbles looked like beans!

Then there was Año Nuevo State Park (#1058), which I’d visited back in 2013 to see the Steele Brothers Dairy Ranches (#906). This place got its name on January 3, 1603 when the voyage of Sebastian Vizcaíno passed by here, and here, the Quiroste people helped the ailing Portolá expedition with food and medicine! I also took a stroll out to see the elephant seal pups at Año Nuevo Point, but they were much too far and wind-blasted to get any good photos!

A whole day of rehearsals and preparations later, the happy couple’s big day arrived! The morning started with some yoga, which I hadn’t done in a long, long time, and then there was the rest of the morning to explore! With the Bigfoot Discovery Museum closed until the weekend, I moseyed into town to see what I could see at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanical Garden! Maybe I’d find a way to mix in some Firstbud festivities!

It was super fortunate that the wedding was scheduled when it was! There wasn’t a cloud in the sky today, but less than a week ago, the latest of 31 atmospheric rivers had dumped water and blasted down trees all over Northern California! The warning signs for the aftermath were very plain, so I’d have to be on my toes, especially if I was going to show off my dance moves later!

First up, I wanted to see the Australian garden, one of the largest collections of Australian plants outside of Australia! Sure, there’s a neat Oz garden at the Huntington Library back in Pasadena, but I’d never seen blossoms like the ones here in Santa Cruz! In fact, Australian plants were what gave this arboretum its start in 1964 with a shipment of 90 species of eucalyptus, expanded under the watch of Chancellor Dean E. McHenry!

Why, just look at these amazingly puffy flowers from the genus Banksia, which grow all along Australia’s coasts! It’s pretty easy to see how Banksia serrata, or Old Man Banksia, got its name! Aboriginal folks would make sweet drinks from the wiriyagan flowers and use the beardly cones to carry fire from one place to another! In fact, like sequoias and redwoods, these shrubby plants need fire to pop open their seed pods!

The Santa Cruz Arboretum is separated into several sections by a chain link fence that was kind of tricky to figure out, but once I did, I got to see some of their world conifer collection, which stretched far over the hills, past bikers, hikers, and grazing deer! Since conifers can be hard to study, living in rugged environments, this collection brings together all but two known species, to expand on what we know of them!

This isn’t just a place to study what is, but what could be! With the climate changing all around us, the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum is also home to a future garden! Set up in 2018, this part-garden and part-art installation is testing out new ways of raising plants under different conditions that could become the norm within 50 years! I hope they make some breakthroughs, because otherwise, lots of folks could be in loads of trouble!

I only had enough time to see one more part of the arboretum, the South African garden, which was very spectacular! This arboretum made a name for itself in cultivating South African proteas, like the Leucospermum cordifolium on the left, and the spectacular Leucadendron gandogeri on the right! It was all so lovely that I almost missed my appointment time for fur and makeup and had to hustle back to the Inn at Pasatiempo right away!

Matt and Leanna got hitched without a hitch up on a beautiful bluff overlooking Monterey Bay! The banquet was very yummy, and I got to make full use of my dance moves since I hadn’t been squished by any trees! This was a nice in-state trip, and it has me hungering to play catchup on some more new landmarks! In fact, I think I’m going to see some on my way to a plaque restoration in a couple of weeks. That’ll be exciting, so stay tuned!

Keep on Santa Cruzin’, folks!