When we planned to drive from Redwood City to Santa Cruz, instead of going close to the Santa Cruz Beach Broadwalk we instead headed towards Mitchell's Cove beach and parked our car around that place. We didn't go down to the beach but plan was to walk from this point towards Broadwalk as there is nice pathway around the coastline to enjoy varied views of the ocean and activities around it's beaches. This blogpost shares about some of the activities or things you can do while walking around the cost from Mitchell's Cove Beach to Lighthouse Field State beach, and then finally towards Santa Cruz Broadwalk.
There are enough parking places around the houses around Mitchell's Cove Beach, so we got our parking lot as we arrived. Kept all the stuff, we were carrying, in the car and started walking towards Lighthouse Field State beach, which was visible at a long distance from this place. It was a sunny day and that's what you need in the month of December in California, especially in San Francisco Bay Area.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceanic divisions. While walking around Pacific Ocean you can feel that. Especially on the highway which connect San Francisco with Santa Cruz through coastline. Pacific Ocean extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south and is bounded by Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east. While loving around Santa Cruz, we thoroughly enjoyed views of the ocean along with beautiful coastline with diverse set of landscaping, shapes & structures.
The play of these waves around the coast made our walk even better. The height and force kept changing. And there are some places around this part of the coastline, where these waves go pretty high and the showers cover a good amount of breadth.
We noticed a bunch of folks sitting around the place & taking the natural showers :). The water of Pacific Ocean is pretty chilled, so it's advisable to be adventurous by knowing limits of your body. Above photograph shows one of the places around this walk where you can see very high tide and because of uneven levels because of rocks, the waves go pretty high after hitting these rocks.
As we reached the halfway, we noticed 2 huge rocks in the ocean which were full of birds on them, and that too huge sized birds. All the photographs in this post are clicked with mobile camera and the bird photographs are yet to be downloaded from the DSLR camera. In above photograph you can see a rock in the middle of the ocean. That's the place where hundreds of birds were sitting and as we approached towards it, we felt a little stink around the place but that was not unexpected for sure.
Lot of folks were running & walking around the coastline with their pets & kids. This stretch seemed to favourite place for locals of the neighbourhood for jogging and running as well.
All the main beaches around this walk were clearly visible from the pathway. For example, Lighthouse Field State beach in above photograph is so clear from the walking trail. Interesting almost everyone on this beach was with dogs. Seemed like a popular beach to come with your pets and have a good networking place for dogs. Some of the dogs were playing with the waves as you can notice one of them in above photograph. This beach is very close to the Lighthouse and the place where Santa Cruz Surfing Museum is.
There are hundreds of beaches on this highway which connected San Francisco with Santa Cruz and usually during weekends folks prefer to come this part of the Bay area to have some beach fun. Although summers is best time and that's when some of the popular beaches around Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz are pretty crowded.
If you notice in these photographs, there is this well paved path for walking around the coastline in Santa Cruz and I loved this part of the walk. This is not specific to this part of the Bay Area but many of the other popular trails have very well paved path and it's ensured that people can also come here and enjoy these magnificent views even is using wheel-chair or a stroller for the kids.
The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum which is visible on the photograph above, is a museum which was established in 1986. This museum was built to capture details around history of surfing. Santa Cruz Surfing museum has a historical account of surfing in Santa Cruz, California and also about surfing in different parts of America.
Santa Cruz Surfing museum is located in the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse at Lighthouse Point which is on West Cliff Drive. Supposedly Santa Cruz Surfing Museum is first Surfing museum in the world. The lighthouse was built in 1967 as a memorial to surfer Mark Abott, who died while surfing at the nearby Pleasure Point surf break.
Santa Cruz museum features photographs, surfboards, and videos tracing over 100 years of surfing history in Santa Cruz area. After funding cuts in 2009, the Santa Cruz Surfing Club Preservation Society and private donations kept the museum open, which is commendable in my opinion.
This walk was sort of concluded at the Lighthouse where we spent good amount of time watching surfers having fun with the waves of Pacific Ocean.
If you liked this post and found it helpful, I would request you to follow these things when traveling -
1. Manage your waste well and don’t litter Use dustbins.
2. Tell us if you went to a place and found it hard to locate a dustbin.
3. Avoid bottle waters in hills. Usually you get clean water in hills and water bottles create lot of mess in our ecosystem.
4. Say big no to plastic and avoid those unhealthy snacks packed in plastic bags. Rather buy fruits.
5. Don't play loud blaring music in forests of jungle camps. You are a guest in that ecosystem and disturbing the locals (humans and animals) is not polite
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