Lunch in Santa Cruz, day one.

I liked Santa Cruz. I liked it so much that we went there twice, two days running. We hadn't intended to, but things we had planned didn't quite fit together. and in the end we made two separate trips: it was no hardship.

The first was my birthday excursion, and we were accompanied by desperance. One of the bits of plan that didn't work out was that we had hoped to see his friends Mike and Paula, formerly of London but now of Santa Cruz. That would have been a bonus, but I was quite happy to stroll through the sunshine and admire the shops and the murals. Then we found the Santa Cruz Bookshop, and I was more than happy: I found the books I hadn't been able to buy in Borderlands, and more besides.

Although Mike and Paula weren't able to join us for lunch, Mike recommended a restaurant: so we ate Middle Eastern in the courtyard at Laili (warning: slow-loading website plays music). We shared flatbread (which they called naan), dipping it in herbs, chopped vegetables, oil. My starter was the Silk Road plate: minty tzatziki, tabbouleh, hummus stained bright yellow with saffron and baba ghanoush (which was good, but not as good as that served at Dish'n'Dash across the road from our hotel. This was not automatically served with bread, but when we asked for bread it was supplied promptly. Since the spinach salad was my main course, I took the option of adding chicken, which was tasty but unnecessary: the pile of spinach leaves was already enlivened with slivers of pink pickled onion, candied walnuts and haloumi. Only durham_rambler was tempted by dessert, a cardamom-pistachio ice cream so thickly studded with pistachios that it was difficult to force a spoon through it (but we all managedm even desperance, who does not do ice cream). We drank white wine from Sarah's Vineyard, billed on the menu as grenache/viognier: this turned out to be there Côteaux de la Madonne. When we tasted it at the vineyard, I had thought that the viognier was masked by the marsanne and roussanne in the blend; here, served colder, the viognier was more apparent, but as it warmed up a more unctuous quality emerged, which was interesting, and I was very content with my choice.

The smarter part of Santa Cruz lies well back from the sea front. We walked (which was a mistake) to the sea, to the Boardwalk, which is seaside as Whitley Bay or Southend is seaside. But if you make your way along the Wharf (which is what I think of as the Pier) past the fish and chip shops and the gaudy souvenirs, down at the far end there's a patch of sea which is all splashing and thrashing and barking: and that's the sea lions, a great raft of them tumbling and jostling and generally having a rowdy good time. And just as I was explaining to desperance that while I was sorry that we hadn't been able to see Mike, actually, the sea lions were better, two pelicans flew past. So as far as I am concerned, the day was, in its unscheduled way, a success.