City of Industry to Santa Cruz

City of Industry to Santa Cruz

Once more into the breach! It's 7am and time to walk the dogs before breakfast. With that little task out of the way with no mishaps we managed to get everything packed up and with two trips to the car were able to sign out of Pacific Palms Resort and head to breakfast.

We found a Denny's down on Valley Ave in La Puente and went in for a light breakfast. I ordered a breakfast sandwich with yogurt and fruit Tina had an egg white omlette and fruit. When the waitress brought mine she informed me that they were out of yogurt and asked if I wanterd an order of fries or hashbrowns. I said I wanted a light healthy breakfast and if they didn't have the yogurt they could discount my breakfast. They did. They only charged us for one cup of $2 coffee instead of two. Goodbye Denny's!!

Over the hills and through the valley's to Santa Cruz we go!

From there we drove over to Don and Diane's for a last visit before heading for the freeway. We stayed for half an hour and said our good byes and made plans to have christmas together. Leaving La Puente we jumped on the I-605 North up to the Foothills Fwy, I-210, which took us all the way to San Fernando Valley where we caught I-5 North through the mountains and into the Sacramento Valley. Its amazing how easy it is to forget how many hills there are north of LA before dropping into the Sacramento Valley. From North San Fernando all the way past Lebec, nearly 60 miles of twisty, turny, up and down at 70 mph plus with Semi's all around. Won't be back this way any time soon...

Oil well derricks as far as the eye could see on both sides of the road - did we get transported back to Texas??

Our route took us on I-5 past Bakerfield and on up to Lost Hills where we turned onto CA-46 headed west. This route took us up over the inland coastal hills and dropped us down into a parched, dry valley. At one point, before going over the Coastal hills  to US-101, we passed though a stretch of highway at least a half mile long where as far as you could see, off to either side of the car, were oil derricks, oil field equipment, collection and distribution piping. I thought we'd been transported back to Texas!

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Another interesting area we passed through was on US-101 just before Soledad where it was raining along the hills to the west of us but where the sun was shining through. Very cool phenomenon. Once we reached Salinas we cut down to Hwy-1 on the coast through Castroville, Watsonville and on into Santa Cruz. With a stop for gas, one for the dogs, lunch and another stop for the dogs, we made it to our hotel in downtown Santa Cruz (about three blocks from the beach) around 4:30pm.

After taking the dogs for a walk and unloading the car we settled in for a while then walked into town for dinner at a small Tacqueria. The food was good but nothing to write home about. After dinner we decided to call it a day and other than a last walk for the kids around 10pm we were done for the night.