Sand goes everywhere - 15/05/2016
For this Sunday we even had a bigger road trip ahead then yesterday. We had to make an almost 500 kilometre trip from San Luis Obispo to Redwood in Silicon Valley. Too bad though because the hotel which we left had some king-size beds and for some of us that was a warm welcome. On the other hand we would go to Silicon Valley. But we started with a joint activity quad driving. So we went to Grover Beach where 12 quads were rented. The group was split and both groups had an hour to explore the dunes. The Oceano Dunes, as they are called, have an area of 445 hectares along a 8 kilometre long beach. This part of the beach is used by riders to park their trailers and trucks. We where just some weird tourist riding a quad for the first time. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have fun.
It took a while to find the correct gears, or even gears at all. The exploring engineers raced of in to the dunes and within no time the first of us got stuck or stalled their engine. But with some common effort these problems where easily fixed. Except for Roel who broke his throttle. This meant that he needed to wait for replacement. The first group had tons of fun and except for some minor bruises everybody survived. Even though some of us flipped their quad. The first hour was over in no time and the quads were handed over to group two. While we waited for the rest to finish on the quads there where some really good hamburgers for lunch. The second group had some more casualties. Berjan made an extra hole in his pants and some others had a good hugging session with their quad but nothing has serious.
The second part of the day was the real road trip. From Oceano Beach we would drive strait north along the coast. This scenic route gave some really nice views and some locations to get out of the car. The first location where the Elephant seals. Which was just a beach with hundreds of seals warming up in the sun. The total laziness and clumsy moving of the seals made it a funny spectacle. Because there was another 4 hours of drive to conquer we moved on. Curvy roads led us between the coast and the mountains trough Big Sur in to Santa Cruz. With the second option being Santa Cruz we parked on a pier (you build a beautiful pier and change it in to a parking space). Santa Cruz has a small classic amusement park on the coastline. As we all were starving we decided to grab something to eat first and eventually take a look in the park. Eventually it turned out that the park closed 10 minutes before we got there. So we continued in the direction of Silicon Valley and arrived in the last hotel of the study trip.
By: Wouter Horlings