Day 6 - 04/09/2022 - The Slow Coast and Santa Cruz

Today I went to a hammock café, and I will now and forever consider any café lacking in hammocks to be inevitably subpar. My friend Joseph drove me down to Santa Cruz, which has a motto I absolutely love: "Keep Santa Cruz weird." And weird it was indeed, and in the best way possible. The mascot of Santa Cruz University, as it turns out, is a banana slug. You would think that this would be a weird mascot for a university in the US, where sports tend to be very important, but it's all part of the charm of Santa Cruz. My favourite part was the Roxa Hammock Café (decorated how my ideal house would be), where I could swing around in my hammock while sipping on a delicious strawberry lemonade called "Philter of Regeneration," which boasted the ability to "Strengthen your Deep Foundational Energy Reserves and Sexual Organs. Support your Bones, Adrenals, Connective and Muscle Tissue." As I was swinging around, someone who passed me by said, smilingly: "You look like you're having fun!" to which I replied "I am!"

After that, it was down to the Pigeon Point Light Station, where we arrived at golden hour and saw the beautiful sunset by the lighthouse. Pretty as the view was, what really caught my attention were a pair of seals playing around in the water and looking like they were having a blast! Seals are not something you see every day (read never) in the UK, and I hadn't seen any since my first visit to California back when I was sixteen. I remember that when I was about to leave for the UK ten years ago almost to the day, one of my aunts was concerned that I, about to be moving into the Midlands of the country, would be too far away from a beach and miss it terribly. Portuguese culture has such a deep connection to the sea that I, as someone who had grown tired of living in Portugal, was only too eager to dismiss. In almost any Portuguese test or exam we took, the first section would be an analysis of a prose text about the sea, the second would be a poem about the sea, and the third would be a creative writing assignment asking you to write prose or poetry about the sea. It was comically repetitive, I thought. Spending a pandemic trapped in the Midlands, however, cured me of my cynicism. I'm now proudly Portuguese, proudly a lover of the sea, and now that I'm once again living by it, I can appreciate a good seaview more than ever.

Three angles of Pigeon Point

The Hammock Café