Mis-Adventures of Nate & Jenny: Glass, and seals, and Mavericks, oh my!

We took the train on Friday from San Francisco to San Jose and hung out with our friends' Rick and Helga and their daughter Dessa. I'll post pictures of them in a later post. On Saturday, Rick and Helga were off on a crazy long bike ride so Nate and I had to figure out something to do. We decided to see if we could go surf in Santa Cruz. We drove to Santa Cruz in the morning and found a really nice break. We hung out a little and decided that we should find a place to rent a board. We went to the Billabong shop and talked to the manager guy, Adam. We asked him about renting boards and suits and he said it was going to $10 to rent a board and $10 to rent a suit. He showed him the board selection and we asked if there were any with any less plastic. He showed us some boards in the back that we could rent if we wanted. Then we talked a bit about surfing and what not and next thing you know, he's telling us to save our money. He told us that the tide was going to keep coming in and the waves were going to get junkier. He said that he thought that were going to be better waves tomorrow.... He then pointed out some spots on the map that we could check out that would be really cool to visit... I'm not sure if he was a total punk and just didn't want us to surf OR if he was really telling us what he thought was to be true because all in all, the tide was in fact backing out and the waves were probably going to get better as the day went by AND the forecast for the next day looked like complete JUNK!! BUT that being said, we did get to see some really cool things along the coast! Instead of just hanging in Santa Cruz all day, we headed north up the coast.

First stop, was a town called Davenport. There is a glass bottling factory in Davenport and it's up the creek from the beach. The creek flows into this beach and brings down broken glass with it. It has basically created a sea glass beach. We didn't actually look for sea glass because we didn't know if we were in the right location, but we did check out the beach and it was really cool. :)

This the cliffs around the sea glass beach in Davenport

The tunnel to the glass bottling factory

Nate checking out a little cave. Me hoping some critter jumped out of the cave and scared Nate! Although, I probably would've screamed louder!! :)

Nate rock climbing the cliffs at the beach.

The next stop on the adventure was to Ano Nuevo State Reserve to see the Elephant Seals. We got to the state reserve and got our little ticket to see the seals and headed out. We first came along a beach and there was a guy knee surfing so we went and checked it out.

The knee surfer is the speck behind the rock in front of us. Also notice that the fog is starting to roll in in the distance.

Along the way to the elephant seals we saw a lizard-dude.

We finally made it to the elephant seals and it was pretty cool. The only elephant seals on the beach at that time were the juvenile seals. The adults had gone off to feed. The juvenile seals were plumping up and learning how to be adults. The first video is all the seals and some of them spraying themselves with sand.

This second video is two juvenile male seals practicing their fight moves.

As we were walking back, we noticed a GIANT seal trying to get into the water. We watched him get back into the water. It was pretty cool.

We got back to the car and kept heading north. The next stop was going to be Pescadaro to see if we could run into Neil Young but we kept seeing signs for Half Moon Bay. Going to find Mavericks was WAY more tempting than Neil Young so we headed north to Half Moon Bay. We used our phones to figure out where Mavericks was and I believe we got to the beach.

It didn't appear to be working when we were there but the fog had completely rolled in so we really couldn't see too much to know.

Nate said he felt a little spooked out while we were there which I was a little thankful for. I would rather him spooked out then thinking how awesome it would be to ride those waves!

It was getting late and the sun was going to set soon so we decided to head back towards San Jose. I really wanted to see the sunset but Nate convinced me that with the thick fog, we weren't going to see it on the beach. We headed towards the highway and as I was looking at the GPS on the phone, I saw a road called, "Skyline Boulevard". I said, "lets take that one". We headed south on highway 35 and as we turned onto the road, I knew we hit jackpot. We started driving out the fog and the sun was starting to set. It was amazing!!!