Happy Trails For Us: My Reluctant Blog

Rachel and Addison thought we should first take a walk along the ocean headlands at Wilder State Park, just north of Santa Cruz.

Wildflowers on the path to the headlands from the parking lot:

The Pacific comes into view:

We meet a goose from Canada:

After we finished walking, we decided a little wine tasting was in order and took ourselves to the Bonny Doon tasting room; to our surprise owner and wine guru Randall Graham was in residence, but too busy to talk that day. We tasted many wines, and selected one to serve at the wedding rehearsal dinner in July.

We needed to feed Addison before he went to work at Bargetto Winery, so we headed to the harbor to have lunch on the deck of the Crow's Nest. Rachel likes to come here for happy hour in the nice summer weather; on Wednesday evenings you can watch the sunset sail regatta.
I tried to take a harbor picture from the deck, but realized all I really got was a picture of two strangers having lunch, but they were having the same good time we were having so . . .

After lunch we took Addison to work, did a little more wine tasting at Bargetto, then hung out at our hotel until we met our nephew for dinner (Tom is a UCSC student). Rachel had recently found a newish family trattoria, Lillian's, which is in mid-town. It's a small room, and really was quite a find, no reservations so we called and put our name on a list, then moseyed over. Very good homestyle Italian food at reasonable prices, but no camera to tell the tale that evening.

Sunday was Mother's Day and we met up with Rachel for brunch at Bargetto Winery; Addison was actually working the catered event. They have created a really nice space out of what was an old deck and some old buildings - the buildings are now gone and the space, overlooking Soquel Creek, has become home to catered parties, weddings, anniversaries and the like. We did Father's Day barbecue here two years ago so I knew Mother's Day brunch would be excellent, and there's the wine, too.

Here's the deck set up for brunch:

and a view of the creek - by mid-summer it gets pretty dry, but here it's only May:

Brunch was lovely, as was the weekend. Funny small world story here is that I heard a woman call my name and when I looked around, she said, "Hi, it's Carole, Carole from Umbria" and it clicked - we had met Carole and her husband at the Locanda Rosati, shared a few agriturisimo pool afternoons and dinners with them, but even though I remembered that they lived in Santa Cruz, who would thought we would meet up with them this weekend almost a year later. She even remembered the Slow Travel connection, so maybe she's reading us online as well.

But alas, we still had to get in the car and drive home, so off we went. I'm hoping we will see Rachel again in a few weeks in Sacramento for Memorial Day weekend. I had a wonderful Mother's Day weekend in Santa Cruz.