The Aptos Office

My senior colleague and mentor, Marc, lives south of Santa Cruz in the beautiful village of Aptos. On Fridays, Marc works from home, and holds meeting at what he refers to as his “second office”, the Pacific Coffee Roasting Company on Soquel Avenue:

We’ve bashed many brain cells, and I’ve sunk many soy chai teas, here.

Once I beat my GPS into submission by overriding it with Marc’s driving directions (incidentally avoiding the freeway bumper-to-bumper-traffic-oh-heck-I’m-going-to-miss-our-meeting stress), I found that Aptos was a beautiful place. It’s billed as “where the forest meets the sea”. Once I managed to avoid the freeway, I found out why. The following four photos were all taken in a roughly similar location:

After a delicious Morrocan style dinner with Marc and his wife, Susan, last Thursday evening, Sean and I decided to head down to New Brighton State Beach and check out the sunset.

The jetty here is unique, as it features the famous concrete ship.

According to http://www.concreteships.org/ships/ww1/paloalto/:

"S. S. Palo Alto ("The Cement Boat") is the most famous concrete ship on the west coast. The Palo Alto was built as an oil tanker by the San Francisco Shipbuilding Company in Oakland, California and launched May 29, 1919. She is the sister ship of the S. S. Peralta.

The Palo Alto remained docked in San Fransisco Bay for over ten years until she was purchased by the Seacliff Amusement Company of Nevada and towed to Seacliff State Beach in Aptos, California. The ship was grounded in the bay and connected to the shore by a long pier. An arcade, dining room, dance hall and even a swimming pool were built on the ship.
Unfortunately, the Seacliff Amusement Company went out of business two years later under the financial crunch of the Great Depression. Then, in winter, a storm cracked the ship across her midsection. The Palo Alto was stripped of all salvagable metal and fixtures and turned into a fishing pier."

 

Ah, Aptos. Yet another beautiful part of the Santa Cruz coast.