The Ugly Mug Coffee House in Soquel, California

My impressions of the Ugly Mug Coffee House in Soquel, CA are mixed. While it certainly has an advantage over the big chain stores such as Starbucks and Peet's Coffee, I was not as impressed with the Ugly Mug Coffee House as many people in Santa Cruz County seem to be. Below is a summary of the pluses and minuses I found at the Ugly Mug, and a summary of my overall impression.

The first observation I have about the Ugly Mug is its semi-desirable location. On the one hand the Ugly Mug is in a corner building in downtown Soquel, California, which makes for a central location for anyone on the East side of Santa Cruz all the way to Aptos. It is also quite close to Cabrillo College, which makes it an ideal place for students to study or for faculty to prepare for their courses. On the other hand, the parking is atrocious due to the lack of dedicated parking that is reserved for the Ugly Mug. The closes parking is across a busy intersection and is a rather small parking lot. This makes it difficult first of all to find a parking spot and difficult second of all to navigate one's way to the Ugly Mug even when one has found a parking spot. The pedestrian crossing at the corner of Soquel Drive and Porter is on an exceptionally slow timer, and often it takes nearly six or seven minutes for the pedestrian walk light to turn green. Of course, Santa Cruz is the capital city of jaywalking, so perhaps this is not an issue for some patrons of the Ugly Mug.

The next observation I made was that the Ugly Mug provides free wireless internet service through Cruzio, a local high speed internet provider in Santa Cruz County. The service was quite fast and reliable, and there were plenty of electrical outlets for the patrons to plug in their laptop computers while enjoying the Ugly Mug's coffee.