A heat bomb blasting the Bay Area and Central Valley has sent residents fleeing to cooler coastal climates for the Fourth of July weekend, packing hotels, roads and beaches from Pacifica to Monterey. “This heat wave, everybody’s trying to get away,” said Kevin Scanlon, a manager at the Beach House hotel in Half Moon Bay, booked solid through Saturday night. “We’re getting a lot of calls from the inland areas where people are really suffering.
” Guests from hot zones “come in and say, ‘Oh my god, it’s so much nicer here, I can breathe,'” Scanlon said. In Santa Cruz, visitors escaping scorched earth to the east were arriving at the Mission Inn & Suites this week “shell shocked” from the heat, said general manager Rebecca Issa. For many residents of the Bay Area and beyond, navigating the twists and turns of Highway 17 in the morning and again in the evening was a small price to pay to get out of the blazing-hot weather.
San Jose mental health therapist Ilene Gilmore fled the city for Santa Cruz around 10 a.m. Wednesday with her mother Blanche Meeks, 80, her daughter and a cousin.
“It was already getting hot,” said Gilmore, 54. “I took the day off from work because of the heat, just to cool off.” Scorching days in Sunnyvale early this week drove Vanessa and Daniel Diaz, with their two daughters Gabby, 2, and Lily, 10 weeks, to the beach at Twin Lakes in Santa Cruz on Wednesday.
They planned to stay just a few hours before returning home. “Why not.
