WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?

A week ago Friday PG&E shut off all the electrons flowing to Cabrillo College so we had a weekday run away.  We actually rolled out early in search of breakfast on the town. There, just around the corner from us was the Bayview Hotel, a rambling old Victorian pile with a dining room in a converted sun porch. 

Luckily we were on a no-schedule holiday because they are in no hurry at the Bayview.  We got our first inkling when it took us five minutes to find anyone at home. Menus were quickly brought forth but coffee took another ten minutes.  Tama ordered crepes stuffed with oranges and brandy and I called up buttermilk pancakes.  Well, apparently they had to make a quick run to France for the crepe batter… our waitress (the owner…) informed Tama that crepes took 25 minutes… no problem, we had nothing ahead of us.  I guess that the staff is dyslexic and had transposed the 2 and the 5… okay, so it was actually 45 minutes but by then the “real” waitress had arrived so the really good coffee kept coming and we had two copies of the Santa Cruz Weekly to peruse.  And when the food arrived it was fresh, hot and damn tasty…just don’t stop by to get a bite before the movie or on your way to work.

Next stop was in the teeny burg of Corralitos between Aptos and Watsonville which is home to The Corralitos Market, a carnivore’s wonderland of meaty bits of steaks, chops, bacon, sausages and the like. All made in-house and remarkably cheap considering.  Since we had the good old Trader Joe’s insulated bag we grabbed up some andouille, some Santa Fe flavored sausages and a pound of smoke-house bacon.

The only real plan we had for the day was to eat some Mexican food in Watsonville… but breakfast had turned out to be brunch so we did a quick pass thru Watsonville and headed east to the bucolic splendors of San Juan Batista. Staying off the arterials led to a wrong turn, but Tama had it once again at her fingertips (smart phone:2, dumb guy:0…) and in no time we were looking for a road into the old part of town.

It seemed so quaint when we had to stop dead to allow a small flockette of chickens wander across the main drag… from a dead stop it was then easy to maintain the posted 25 mph.  Well, within an hour we had been privy to two ardent locals with diametrically opposing views on “The Great Feral Chicken Debate”. It seems that San Juan Batista is awash in droves of wild chickens that wander, dine and drop anywhere the mood takes them.  Half the locals think this is cute and is a great hook that brings a smile to the lips of the hordes of touristas (yes, we smiled…) and, as we all know, a happy tourist is a spending tourist.  The other half of the Batisters think the chickens are spreading shit, feathers, disease and a hillbilly attitude and need to head out to that great processing plant in the sky.  Both sides are at the signatures on a petition stage of the game and Monday night council meetings are probably hellish to say the least.

Still not hungry and having seen a surfeit of antique stores, we popped into a local main street watering hole for a cold one & some salty peanuts and then we were off to Moss Landing and a stop at our favorite fruit & veg stand.  Grapefruit (10 for a buck), raspberries, peaches, cilantro, spuds, dinky Ecuadorian bananas, mango, plums… a heaping shopping bag full of farm fresh eatables for a mere seventeen bucks.

Okay, so now it’s after 5 o’clock and we are finally hungry and on our way back to Watsonville.  Tama had done a quickie poll of her Hispanic employees so we had a short list to draw from and settled on Real Colima.  A brightly colored building in an equally brightly colored neighborhood and a mostly non-anglo room full of diners showed great promise.  We got the menu and ordered our food.  Dinner came in good time but that was the last time we saw even a flicker of interest from our waitress… and we thought that the breakfast service had been bad… the only way I could have caught this waitress’ attention would have been with a fishing rod and a treble hook.  The food was very good… Tama had mole and I went with a tamale platter but, goddamn it, you can’t really eat Mexican food without washing it all down with great lashings of Tecate, and you can’t get a beer unless you can get a waitress.  Sorry, but in a neck of the woods where Mexican food joints pop up like Canadian thistle, you only get one chance to hit the mark or wind up on the also ran list.