---
title: 'Day 18: Santa Cruz'
date: 2010-05-13T11:59:28+02:00
Tags: []
Categories: []
---

## iFlew and sushi-a-plenty

Right now I'm in the car doing 70 on the freeway (i-5) to Santa Cruz and I realised that I haven't given any update on what we did yesterday. Funny how things go .. I was just mentioning to Paul "well we didn't even do anything yesterday" and he goes "Dude!" and it hits me - the skydive. How could I forget? :-)

When we left the Samba Brazilian restaurant (where the Rodizio really was amazing!), we walked across the street to the iFly stand. They had closed up for the night but we were definitely interested to do this, so we jumped at the opportunity and booked ourselves a class and a "flight" for noon on 5/12/2010. We got there a few minutes early, and after some confusion about our payment and reservation, we were all good to go. Our instructor's name was Matt, and we were together with two asian-types, one of which spoke a little english, and the other none at all. We got a lesson in reading signs from the instructor (on when to relax, tense, stretch legs, raise chin, and so on), and the one guy translated for his comrade.

We then went outside for a one minute dive in a huge column of air. Now one minute may not sound like much, but really, it's hard work in there and apparently it's the same free-fall time as a regular airplane jump. So Paul went in first, and got the hang of it pretty quickly. Then it was my turn and it didn't go that bad for me either. Because today was special somehow, we could purchase extra flight time for $10 per person, and it didn't take long for both of us to decide we wanted to go again (about 3 milliseconds for Paul, and 5 milliseconds for me).

The second flight was a little bit more work for me - the wind rushing past my body made me have to push down with my arms a bit more than the last time, and I actually felt the strain in my shoulders and torso. But I'm not complaining, it was awesome, amazing, great and fantastic. I'd use more words if I need to, but I think my new found love for this sport is obvioius :)

When we got back to the locker room, we were shown a bunch of pictures. But unfortunately, the two cameras were swapped, so when the guy took pictures, he always took them with the wrong camera, and therefor all pics were kind of empty. As a comp, the guys from iFly offered us a free DVD of our flight which we happily accepted. This was awesome!!

Then we made our way to the beaches in SMO. We drove down, parked our car at Ocean Ave, walked over the beach to the boardwalk, made our way to the far end of the pier, and there's where I noticed that this is the westernmost point of Route 66. Yaay! We've driven route 66 for 4 states (TX, NM, AZ, CA) and seeing the end of it really is 'closure'. We bought some postcards to commemorate this.

It was now around 4:30pm so we decided to give the Google office a visit. This office was kind of quiet, so we walked around it for a while looking for faces I'd recognize, and then played a game of pool, had a drink, and took off again. We went out to each sushi - in the true sense, with three platters of 25 sashimi pieces each - they were delicious!! and I took a picture of them to send to my buddies sejo and denraf (cc Marina to tease her :).

After dinner, we drove around beverly hills, bel air, and the downtown area of LA, down Sunset Blvd, and then back to our motel6 in Hollywood. It was a good "end of the journey". I say this in quotes because actually we have still 400 miles or so to go.

Today we're driving to Santa Cruz, and then up to Los Gatos where we'll meet up with Mike and go out drinking to the local pub. He'll be the first to hear of all of our stories, and as I'm not sure he's reading the blog, who knows, maybe we'll actually have some novel stories for him!

Location: [i-5 freeway 47mi south of the 152](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=I5%Freeway%at%152%California)

**Posted by Pim van Pelt at 12:15 PM**

