Santa Catalina and back again

  • Gull and cellphoner

    The short cruise I went on ended last Fri­day, and I’ve got some pho­tos and a draw­ing of Santa Catalina. Sort of a mini-travelogue, I sup­pose.

    The cruise went to San Diego and Ense­nada as well, but for some rea­son, Santa Catalina ended up being the most pho­to­genic stop.I just had for­got­ten how pretty it was. I had been twice before when I lived in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and I only had dim mem­o­ries of the lit­tle town of Avalon sit­ting crowded and des­per­ately cute tot­ter­ing on the edge of a cliffy island that looks ready to push it back into the ocean. But then maybe I can be for­given for hav­ing sin­is­ter mem­o­ries — the last time I went to Sta. Catalina, I took the boat over from New­port Beach and was out­ra­geously sea­sick by the time I got there.

    Catalina drawing

    Catalina harborHav­ing this time taken a cruise boat (slo­gan of cruise boats every­where: if we encounter a tsunami, it might cause cups to tin­kle together dur­ing teatime), I stepped onto the dock right as rain and was sur­prised to see before me just a jewel of a place.

    A mite foggy per­haps, but then that might have been a good thing. It was in the 70′s as it was (in early Decem­ber. sigh. You gotta love that South­ern Cal­i­for­nia “win­ter”.) It was all tidy lit­tle shops sell­ing Tommy Bahama every­thing, lit­tle stands sell­ing dried starfishes shaped like every­thing else and … ice cream shops. Who knows why, but Sta. Catalina prob­a­bly has more ice cream shops per capita than any­where else out­side of wher­ever the Oompa-loompas come from. If we had had more time we might have tried to find out which one was best.

    Catalina w casinoBut time was in short sup­ply, and so after doing a lit­tle shop­ping I struck out for the “casino”. The casino is the biggest eye-candy in the town of Avalon, a mon­strous Art Deco cream-colored build­ing that you can just imag­ine flap­pers and zoot-suiters cut­ting a rug in. And so they did, prob­a­bly. It was built in 1929 by William Wrigley (one of the chew­ing gum guys), and it’s never actu­ally been a casino, but it’s been a ball­room, a the­ater, a museum and a lot of other things. It’s just a Jazz Age bit of swank to dress up the land­scape, but it’s also an easy half-mile stroll to get to, just to say you did. catalina_casino.jpgOther than the breezy walk, there wasn’t a big pay­off for me in get­ting to the casino, other than nab­bing this nifty pic­ture of palm tree shad­ows that I man­aged to click in the twelve sec­onds that the fog burned off.

    So that was about it. This was a short cruise that was more about the com­pany than the des­ti­na­tions, so it was just a bit of some­thing extra to reac­quaint myself with Santa Catalina and find that it could sur­prise me a little.


    Related posts:

    1. BTW, my boat’s not on fire
    2. In Jean for Thanks­giv­ing, Vegas the next day
    3. Cruis­ing: But then again …
    4. Edin­burgh

    December 12th, 2006 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 12.12.2006

    Wow. Your draw­ings are incred­i­ble.
    I’ve been to Catalina once, but I was maybe 10? It’s been a long time.

  • Grace

    Thanks! I didn’t know if it trans­lated very well as a small JPEG. I have a long sketch­book that is par­tic­u­larly good for land­scapes, but I’m for­ever find that I need to go across both pages. And in this case most of Avalon got swal­lowed up by the crease between the pages!

    Come to think of it, I’ll put on the sketches of the other places, just for grins. None of them are award-winners, but peo­ple seem to like this sort of thing.

    It’s a tes­ta­ment to just how lit­tle any­body sketches any­more that I attract so much atten­tion (mostly unwanted) and gar­ner so many com­pli­ments (mostly too kind) by doing it.

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