Taxi Services Pop quiz, hotshot: It’s after midnight, you’re downtown, you’re drunk and you have an 8am discussion section. What do you do? What do you do?! Thursday through Sunday, the university’s Night Owl service makes runs between Pacific Avenue and campus until 2am, 3am on Fridays and Saturdays. METRO runs Dial-A-Ride (831.426.6738), a car service that will pick up UCSC ID holders for free ($1.50 for everyone else) from almost anywhere on the Westside and transport them to campus. For those headed anywhere other than campus, there is Go Green Cab’s fleet of biodiesel-powered Mercedes Benzes (831.246.1234) or, for the driver who partied a little harder than anticipated, Hero DD (831.421.2429). The men in black and orange will ride their Italian-made DiBlasi scooters to pick you up and drive you home in your own car with the collapsible scooter folded up in the trunk, then be on their merry way. Fares start at $12, $3 per mile thereafter.
The Jury Room (712 Ocean St., 831.426.7120) Some bars (no names mentioned) open at 4pm, close at 10pm, sling a few $5 beers in between and call it an “all day happy hour.” Not the Jury Room. On Wednesdays, the dive’s hour happy starts at 6am keeps on keepin’ on until 2am the next morning. That’s 20—count ’em—20 hours of happiness. The price is right too: $2.50 for well drinks and brews. Add that to the free pool, free tunes on the jukebox, NFL ticket and Marv, the mustachioed man of mystery behind the bar … the only thing that there isn’t are a lot of good reasons to leave.
24-Hour Dining The are several establishments from which to choose how to spend the four hours between the Jury Room’s closing and reopening. First among them is the beloved Santa Cruz Diner (909 Ocean St., 831.426.7151), just a hop, skip and a jump up Ocean Street, where you can order anything from pho to French toast at any hour of the day or night. More standard diner fare can be found on the menus at Denny’s (1515 Ocean St., 831.426.4628) and Jeffery’s Restaurant (2050 Soquel Ave., 831.425.1485), open 24 hours as well. The Saturn Cafe (145 Laurel St., 831.429.8505) is a classic choice and open til 3am.
Nite Owl Cookies (Friday-Sunday, 8pm to 1:30am. 831.423.6483) The worst part about moving to a new place is missing the comforts of home—like the ability to walk into the kitchen in the middle of the night for a cookie and a glass of milk. But chin up! There are perks of not living at home, too, and you can still nosh Nite Owl Cookies in the middle of the night and have delicious treats dropped at your doorstep. Nite Owl specializes in cookies, but they’ve also got ice cream sandwiches, frozen yogurt, dice, beer pong kits—even condoms. I’ll say it again: there are perks to not living at home.
Midnight Movies at the Del Mar (1124 Pacific Ave. 831.469.3220) At midnight on a Friday or Saturday, one would be hard pressed to distinguish the rowdy crowd filing into the Del Mar Theatre from the one going into Motiv or Rosie McCann’s. The difference is, instead of dub step or Top 40, this crowd is amped to watch the Princess Bride or Evil Dead on the big screen. On weekend nights the “Pearl of Pacific” screens cult classics and, on occasion, new films with too limited a cachet to fill the theater for a weeklong run. Coming up this fall: Fight Club (Sept. 23-24), Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (Sept. 30-Oct. 1), The Shining (Oct. 7-8), The Last Circus (Oct. 14-15) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Oct. 28-29).
