On Thursday 6 April 2023, my wife and I walked up Bay to the UCSC Surplus Store (which is only open 12–3 Tuesdays and Thursdays), to see whether they had any bookcases that she could buy for her library at work. The answer was not clear—all the bookcases were 36″ wide, and that may be an inch or two too wide for the space she has (she’ll measure on Monday to double-check). She was hoping for a 30″ one, but that does not seem to be a common size at UCSC (at least, not for surplussed ones).
After the surplus store, we went to the Arboretum by going up Ranch View Road to the back gate of the Arboretum. Unfortunately, the back gates were locked, and we had to go around the Arboretum to the north gate, which was still open We walked through the banksia fields, but all the banksia seem to have been over for the year—there are some nice seed pods, but no flowers. In the African gardens there were some nice protea, though nowhere near as many as there used to be, and all on rather small plants. I suspect that a lot of the protea died a few years ago, and their replacements are slow in growing back. The protea were the showiest flowers in the gardens, though there were a few other nice ones—I’m thinking that I might want to get a “Winter Red” conebush for my yard, as they had quite impressive foliage (which, unfortunately, my photo did not capture well, so I won’t include it here).

On the way to the surplus store, we saw a great blue heron behind the Granary. We believe that is was probably hunting gophers or ground squirrels.
The whole walk was about 4.6 miles and took us a little under 3 hours, including the time spent browsing the surplus store, taking pictures of flowers, and browsing Norrie’s Gift Shop at the Arboretum.