Mendocino to Santa Cruz

Mendocino is where East of Eden was filmed. It's a small, 19th century settlement of sun-baked wooden houses, complete with whitewashed picket fences and flowery gardens.
We spent an hour there, breaking our drive south on the California 1 highway.
Until Hollywood abandoned it a decade or so ago, the town was the setting for Murder She Wrote and dozens of other films. The inhabitants now are mainly kind-faced coastal folk who make their living selling tea cakes and - as this is the West Coast - cultivating marijuana.
Back on the road, we passed clifftops and hairpins on our way to San Francisco (without flowers in our hair), and crossed the Golden Gate bridge around 8pm as the sun was setting. This meant we had completed our overland journey from Vancouver with a couple of days in hand, so we carried on to a motel in Santa Cruz.
A word on American motels. These places are brilliant - cheap, all with internet, big rooms, no nonsense reception, and if you're a fan of cheesy films about outlaws on the run, strangely familiar. I loved them.
The main attraction in Santa Cruz is the boardwalk, where you can ride ancient rollercoasters, eat colourful junkfood and shop in Momo's beach shack. We stayed two nights in our motel, walking around the town and beach and visiting the world famous Mystery Spot, a brilliant outfit that turns a garden shed into an international tourist attraction by building it on a slope. Apparently, it is situated above pieces of space metal planted years ago by alien visitors, and the normal rules of physics don't apply. Mysterious indeed!
Next morning, with my sense of balance honed by the space metal, I took a surf lesson. Thanks to a timely shove from John, my professional surfing coach (now there's a job), I managed to stand up and ride half a dozen little waves into shore, along with about a hundred other learners, mostly aged 12 or below. I finished utterly exhausted but feeling ready for Hawaii. C, who had been waiting patiently on the beach, suggested we go to San Fran first, so that's the next stop.
G