Manresa State Beach and Seacliff State Beach, California

 Third Quarter Moon

This post is two for the price of one. Yesterday I walked from Manresa State Beach to Sunset State Beach and back. And today I walked from Seacliff State Beach to Manresa State Beach and back. I've been gobbling up sand and spitting it out, parking for free with my Library Day Use Pass, eyeballing the California melting pot surf monkeys, and watching the Sun burn off the fog at three miles per hour. It is way fun and pretty durn good exercise. 

Of the three parks, I think Sunset is the best. The campground there is sandwiched between the strawberry fields and the dunes and the Day Use lot is shady and a quick 'n easy walk to the spacious beach. Manresa's tent campground is okay, but relatively small and the parking lot is a half-mile dune walk to a nice beach that has become a little overdeveloped. There are boo-coo bungalows and condos staring at you from the dune-tops as you walk and that gets pretty annoying after a while. 

However, Manresa is more relaxing than Seacliff. Seacliff is busy. It has an RV campground slash parking lot right on the beach, making it feel kind of SoCal-ish. The beach is crowded and cramped, and the condos, etc. encroach a little too close to the whole scene, again like SoCal. The Day Use lot is huge, like a Walmart parking lot dotted with EV charging stations. From there you descend several flights of wooden steps down to a paved path that leads to a row of ramadas with non-social-distanced picnic tables and multiple fancy restrooms. 

It's really too busy. Seacliff's saving grace is its old wharf that used to lead to a historical docked cement ship. Now the cement ship is cracked in half and mostly sunk, so the end of the wharf is fenced off to keep the stoners from harming themselves. A mish mash of seabirds has taken over the fenced-off section, making it into their very own ammonia-smelly open air condo. Frankly, I think it's the coolest thing there is at Seacliff State Beach. I love it.

Once you walk past all the people and their amazingly complicated beach gear, the sand opens up toward Manresa and the cliffs show their true colors. It's a longer walk between these two places than it is between Manresa and Sunset, but it's fun to wander and the surf sound never gets old.

Who knows exactly what this is, but I like it anyway.

By the time I got back to the wooden staircase, I was pretty tired, but I chugged some water and gamely, steadily began to ascend. I was only a little winded and making pretty good time, I thought, when this giant athletic woman bounded past me, taking two stairs at a time. She was at least 6'3" tall, thirty-something, with a lean, well-muscled build, obviously a competitive athlete of some sort. 

As she whooshed past, I said, "Okay, now you're making me feel bad." I was joking. I felt fine - I was just a little astonished that anyone could go that fast up all those stairs with seemingly such little effort. She didn't miss a beat, though, she just shrugged her shoulders and threw her hands in the air as if to say it must suck to be me. It was trash talk without the talking part. 

When I reached the top (it didn't take me that much longer than it took her, even though I was wearing a knee brace and using the handrail the whole time, haha), she was doing military pushups, like really really fast military pushups. I passed by without breaking stride and said " I feel great, I was joking." 

She replied, and I quote: "Ha Ha." To be clear, this was not a laugh. It was a recitation of the syllables "Ha" and "Ha." That was all. In between pushups. It was like military trash talk.

So I think I met my first beach cyborg today. A very interesting encounter. It was almost as personable as a sunken cement ship.

Peace, Love, and AI,

Jim

#2,022 in 2022