Final Destination

Stage VI, Parts II & III

We departed San Francisco with slightly heavy hearts, as we could not stay in this wonderful city any longer. But we'll be back. We would our way down to Santa Cruz and the home of the banana slugs...also known to Lauren as home for a few years of college. I don't know why anyone would want to attend college anywhere else other than the University of California at Santa Cruz. Campus lends itself to a national forest which happens to border the ocean. Come on. COME ON.

We walked amongst the girthy sequioas and under the circling hawks that protect the campus. I felt a sense of peace about the place as we trapsed about the campus...Lauren told me about the system of grading without actual letter grades and about the regularity of hippies that attend the school. I could only imagine how this place is a veritable haven for pot smokers of the collegiate age, given the natural beauty of the campus and the feeling like you're in some protective community where anything goes and nothing goes beyond the gates of the campus.

Anyway, please enjoy some more of my lovely Lauren's photo journalism, Santa Cruz and Gilroy style.

Cowell College...one of the eight or nine colleges that are a part of the system at UCSC and the college that Lauren attended while she was there. Cowell is the Liberal Arts college and it overlooks the ocean, as you can see here. You know, maybe I'll just go back to school at UCSC and start over. It's not like I learned anything from my 5 years at UMass, anyway.

Expansive fields on which one can play various sports and the backdrop is, as I may have mentioned, the ocean. Pretty sweet deal.

More from the fields o'er the ocean.

And finally, the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Without expectations, this place blew our minds. Who knew that a celebration of garlic could produce such a mass of food and shit to see. We should have come earlier and spent the entire day, but we didn't know what we were coming into. Instead, we spent a few hours here in Gilroy, we ate jalapeno poppers, garlic ice cream, garlic potato chips, buffalo wings and...beer. We drank some beers which tasted glorious in the 98 degree heat. We took this photo in front of a giant, burning clove of garlic. We then returned to our vehicle for the remaining 4.5 hours of driving that would land us in Los Angeles to find that some dipshit had left the passenger's side window down. Yes, with all of my belongings atop the car, in the car and about the car as well as Lauren's bag, wallet, cell phone and my cell phone, iPod, GPS, etc etc etc...I left the passenger's window open. For three some odd hours. Amongst a slew of garlic-seeking stragglers from all over. It could have been a disastrous climax to a long and arduous journey of 4000 miles, but no one took our stuff. They probably walked by and figured, hey, why fuck over someone who stinks of garlic and beer?

I almost forgot...Bowen, we did happen upon a banana slug, seen here on his laptop. He was too busy to take a picture with us...turns out he was spoofing the biographical Tupac movie with a version of his own called "Slug Life". He was surpisingly trendy with his D&G shades and Uggz knockoffs...yeah, called Sluggz. Ripoffs. But apparently they do indeed exist and they are intelligent creatures. They just don't care to take photographs with humans.