Santa Cruz Ca

At a reception in the mountains above Santa Cruz, dozens of surfers of a certain age, balancing wine glasses and pizza slices, basked in their closeness to a little piece of their sport's history. The celebrants at the San Lorenzo Valley Historical Museum had known the basic story for a while: In 1885, three Hawaiian princes visiting Santa Cruz on a break from military school wowed the locals with, as a newspaper report put it, "interesting exhibitions of surf-board swimming as practiced in their native islands."

I left Los Angeles to attend the University of California at Santa Cruz in the late '70s, and spent the next three years living and studying in the halcyon environs of one of the country's most liberal communities, a bastion of progressive politics and alternative lifestyles that happened to be situated in a charming, once-conservative beach town.

A shop on the Santa Cruz wharf will stop selling T-shirts marked "Surf City, Santa Cruz California, U.S.A.," ending more than a year of litigation with the Huntington Beach tourist bureau, a lawyer for the agency said Sunday. The suit became a proxy debate over which California beach town could call itself the nation's surf capital. The Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau registered the "Surf City U.S.A."

At his independent bookstore in this famously left-leaning town, Neil Coonerty offers bestsellers from both sides of the political spectrum. But there's freedom in owning your own shop: You can make fun of those you don't like. Over three decades, the 60-year-old former Berkeley radical has skewered his share of conservative authors and politicians -- along with others whose ideas he didn't think were worth the paper they were printed on.

On the continuum of things that make no sense to me, spitting good wine into a tin bucket falls somewhere between intelligent design and every David Lynch film I have ever seen. And so, even though "spitters" would crucify me for it during my eight-hour speed-tasting tour of Santa Cruz Mountains wineries, I was determined to drink up. A rising blood alcohol level would help me deal with my friend Rod, who had yet to apologize for abruptly blowing off my East Coast wedding three years earlier.

THE screams of the happily terrified filtered down as the Giant Dipper thundered above us. We were beneath the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, where the Dipper's 75-horsepower engine (the 1924 original) was pumping away. The 83-year-old Dipper is the most popular of the boardwalk's 35 rides. But it's not the oldest. The carousel, with its intricately carved and painted horses, dates from 1911, four years after the birth of the "modern" boardwalk.

There's no shortage of movie theaters in this university town, but there's also no shortage of out-of-the-way patches of scrub. Guerilla Drive-In prefers the latter. At Guerilla Drive-In screenings, you don't shell out $12 for tickets or stretch out in stadium seats. Instead, you join a hundred or more cinema fans draped in blankets and hunkered down amid the weeds, watching films projected onto random walls. Guerilla Drive-in has been a semi-underground summer diversion here since 2002.

Even in a city famed for its liberal policies on marijuana, police in Santa Cruz had to wonder what a robbery victim must have been smoking before he called them this week. A 20-year-old resident of nearby Felton, he complained that two men pointed a gun through the window of his parked car and made off with four ounces of marijuana that happened to be sitting in his lap. At first, he claimed it was for medicinal use only, according to police.

SANTA CRUZ -- The Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency has closed a restaurant and opened an investigation after at least 80 diners and employees got sick in the last week. Bob Kennedy, the county's director of environmental health, wouldn't name the restaurant because the investigation is incomplete. More than 1,000 people may have been exposed to a gastrointestinal virus, which is spread through fecal-oral contact. Kennedy blamed transmission on failure to wash hands.

First there was the playful battle over which beachfront city deserved to carry the banner of Surf City. Now it's down to which seaside city should be recognized as having the state's one true surf museum. While some patrons of the arts may be unaware there even are such things, town leaders in Oceanside and Huntington Beach are going to great lengths -- all the way to Sacramento, in fact -- to make sure their modest surf museums get the respect they deserve.