Brown Motion

A hazy fall day in the bay area courtesy some seriously climactic climate to the north of us.  Left bunch of humans dead is how bad it got with a sudden wildfire burning out of control in a sleepy town north of Sacramento. There was poor air quality advisory prompting many to familiarize themselves with a hitherto unknown short form called AQI as in Air Quality Index in the area where they live.  Ours was showing air quality worse than New Delhi and that is saying something.  New Delhi as in India's capital, has its denizens burning wood and cow dung patties along with garbage as a source of fuel to cook food and bake bricks for construction sites.  Result is an atmosphere with cancer causing particulate abundant in volume so much as to block out the sun from shining through. So we scoped out some pockets of relatively clean air in the bay area and decided to hit the coast of Santa Cruz.  A former mission lends its name to the town that was established in ...

Back in the 70s when I grew up in erstwhile Bombay, now Mumbai, there was a burb where the planes flew from and it was called Santa Cruz.  It was almost synonymous to locals as Bombay's airport.  There was probably sketchy international service back then and all of domestic traffic operated on the two runways. Fast forward to California and I found a town on the Pacific coast also by the same name.  This one named by a Spanish explorer and labeled to mean the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz).  Well actually I had found it many moons ago and have visited often but this past Thanksgiving it was another day of R&R that found the familia doing familiar things and celebrating nature around us.  Thanking the good earth for the beauty it has to offer, our way of Thanksgiving.  The only bird(s) we enjoyed were the brown pelicans on the coast. So going back to what was special this time around was a visit to two regional parks operated under the State Parks jurisdic...