18 Sunday

Drove to Santa Cruz today. Being a Sunday we knew that the Board Walk would be operating. We met Russell, Novey and Calvin on the Pier. We walked to the end of the pier where we saw many sea lions lazing underneath. They were very smelly and made quite a racket with their coughing noises. Had a light lunch at a takeaway bar then made our way over to the Board Walk for some fun activities. Raewyn and Brendan chose as many of the scary rides as they could manage to fit in. Russell took Calvin on a toddlers version of a roller coaster. Calvin looked very serious about the whole thing but with Russell’s protective arm around him he lasted the ride without any fuss. Vern and I managed to climb our way onto the gondola for a ride across the top of the Board Walk. Russell and Novey had by this time decided that they wanted to go back home. Later in the afternoon we decided to look for the MYSTERY SPOT!! Raewyn had heard about this from a colleague back here in New Zealand so we were interested to see what it was all about. After a bit of cruising around we managed to find it. We had to pay of course. The group we were to join up with had about a 45 minute wait. We were escorted by a young woman who used a very ghostly type voice to try and convince us that this place was somehow created by aliens and that what we were seeing was not man-made. We saw balls rolling uphill, people standing on a seemingly flat board in order of size then changing places and still appearing in order of size, standing up but leaning backwards and lots of other laws of gravitation going haywire. You certainly feel very strange while standing in this area. At one stage I lost my footing completely. Certainly a very different place to visit but I don’t think it was created by Aliens as the Brochure tells you.