Surf City, USA

Jill's Journal: Santa Cruz, wonderful Santa Cruz. It just might be the epitome of the stereotypical surfer/liberal/hippie Californian, which is so not us, but gosh darn, it’s awfully fun to visit. We got to know the town a little bit

today and did quite a bit of exploring on foot. The highlight was clearly the surfers. We walked a good half-mile or more along West Cliff to watch the action and the girls could not have been more mesmerized. The amount of surfers in the water was staggering.

Walking along the cliffs, we slowly made our way to the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse and the home of the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum. The tiny museum is a gem, tracing over 100 years of surfing culture in Santa Cruz. It has early surfboards, which were nothing more than redwood planks, and traces the evolution of surfing all the way to today’s high-tech designs. The girls especially got a kick out of a board which survived a shark attack (the surfer made it too!). An 18-year-old surfer who died on a wave is even interred at the museum.

Surfing was introduced to Santa Cruz (and the U.S.) by three Hawaiian princes who attended university nearby in 1885. The royal Hawaiian sport spawned a mainland craze. Santa Cruz would certainly never be the same. Surfing is truly a culture all its own – and a fascinating one at that. There is evidence Hawaiians have been surfing since the at least 15th century and even Captain James Cook wrote about it in the 1770s, but it took those three Hawaiian princes in the late 1800s to transform California.

The museum overlooks legendary Steamer Lane, a well-known surfing location so named because the death-defying waves in that spot were once part of a shipping "lane" used by steamships. Ninety-two people have drowned in the area since they started keeping track in 1965.