Capitola Weekend Trip

 

For labor day weekend we decided to ride to Capitola and back for the Saturday and Sunday. The kids were pretty happy about going to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, the first time Boen would attend in which he's tall enough to do all the "fun" rides.

We cheated by driving to the Lexington Elementary school, parking the car, and starting up Old Santa Cruz Highway. This is by far the easiest way to ride to Capitola. We'd booked the Quality Inn in Capitola. The ride to summit road was fairly easy, and then the nerve wracking ride along summit road to the Summit store, where we ate lunch. It was surprisingly warm, and we were happy to start descending Soquel San Jose road.

That road was fast and furious as usual, and at the bottom we found the Quality Inn. Bowen needed new shoes, however, so we rode over to REI to discover that the Santa Cruz REI had a very poor selection of shoes and their sales did not apply to shoes! We bought a very expensive pair not having much choice and then rode back to the inn to put on shoes and then call an Uber to the Boardwalk.

The Uber driver dropped us off not at the boardwalk, but across the bridge, which was a very short walk and bypassed a ton of traffic. There, the kids did 3 rides, but Boen bailed on the last one so I had to do it with Bowen. Then we took an Uber to the Capitola beach where we ate Tacos at Mijo's Taqueria. After that we had ice cream and a walk along the beach and then back along the Soquel Creek, stopping at Gayle's Bakery to buy more dessert.

The next morning we had the hotel breakfast and left to ride across Santa Cruz to get to Graham Hill Road. Graham Hill Road made us glad we decided to bring the tandem.  The road was busy and uphill, but once it dropped us off on East Zyante Road it became a lot quieter and we had a good ride.

At the only grocery store on East Zyante Road we had a snack before tackling the climb, which was steep. In fact, at one spot we had to stop to rest. Of course, Xiaoqin didn't have any trouble at all with the climb and was forced to wait for us.

Once at the top of Zyante Road we turned right onto summit road to ride over to Mt Charlie Road. On the intersection over 17 Xiaoqin had a very slow-motion fall as she had to dodge a car. But despite that she was fine and we all made it back to the Lexington School in time to visit Chickenlicious for a late lunch.