Carmel was lovely lovely lovely. LOVELY! Chad was more relaxed that I’ve seen him in years. Seriously. The boy is always worrying about this or that he has to do. He swam with me and smiled at me and kissed me all weekend and was generally sweet and calm and happy.
So we took this last-minute overnight trip to Monterey. We drove down 101, which goes through farmland and took a break at Mission San Juan Bautista [the climax of Vertigo takes place here] and saw more than a few hens and chicks and roosters and a wedding. We arrived at our cute little cabin —
An aside here, if you are going to be in the Monterey-Carmel-Big Sur area, you could do a lot worse than staying at the Carmel River Inn. It is not super fancy but it is the cutest little green cabins with cut-out shutters and they are very reasonably priced — ours was $110 for a summer Saturday night, which is chump change in that area. There are lots of flowers and frogs and crickets and the staff is nice and it’s a short drive from anything you want to do.
— which turned out to be the one I have been eyeing since the first time we went there, it is the most removed and sits at the edge of a field and has an enclosed patio and gets great light. We took a swim — it was a hot day but the water felt nice and warm — then we went down to Carmel Beach [white sand, pale blue-green water, very sexy!] to watch the sunset and another wedding. That’s *the* Lone Cypress out there on the point.
We tried to go to Vivolo’s for dinner — they have the most amazing clam chowder — but they close whenever they feel like it, which that night was just as we arrived, so we went to a BBQ joint and I ate SO. MUCH. MEAT. Then went back to our cabin for some stargazing from the hammock out back and went to bed early.
Saturday morning we woke up super-early — very unlike us, we can barely drag ourselves out of bed before check-out — and I went for a swim, then made a quick stop in Carmel-by-the-Sea to stop by the Cottage of Sweets, home of the World of Licorice, because we needed to stock up.
We had breakfast at Toastie’s in Pacific Grove and there was some kind of bicycling extravaganza that started with a race between a hundred or so children, followed by grown people doing a zillion laps around downtown for the rest of the day.
We headed over to Cannery Row in Monterey [yes, the Steinbeck one] to find the sea glass beach I’d read about. Turns out there is a little public access beach right in the middle, it’s a sweet little yellow-sand cove with tidepools, and on the south/east end there are quite a few tiny bits of sea glass.
I met a woman from Arizona who was just beside herself with glee over this. I wanted bigger pieces so Chad and I ventured underneath the boardwalk — you can clamber over the old pieces of older iterations of the boardwalk, rusty old pipes and hunks of ancient concrete, almost all the way down to the aquarium. It was very dark under there but I found a few larger pieces of glass and gave the biggest to the Arizona lady since she doesn’t have her own ocean to explore whenever she feels like it.
We drove down Sunset, which goes around the point at the end of Monterey past a bunch of tidepools and a golf course and an old lighthouse, and stopped at Asilomar State Beach [check out the Julia Morgan Architecture just over the dunes]. Asilomar is another of those white sand, pale blue-green water beaches like Carmel. We had an hour or so of sun before the fog rolled in and lolled in the sand and it was really, really, really nice. Just super.
Chad went in the 55° water because he is crazy. We went for a walk almost all the way down to the next beach over, which is along 17-Mile Drive and a hop-skip from Pebble Beach Of Golf Fame.
We got a ticket because there is a sign that says “no parking between this and the next sign” then there is another sign five feet away but I guess that is not the next sign they mean.
We had ice cream at this wacky little parlor that is covered floor-to-ceiling with Beatles collectibles. We stopped in Castroville, home of the Giant Artichoke, on the way home and got the most amazing food, which is deep fried artichokes. Seriously good stuff. It was a very good weekend.
I am still working on the photos but most of them are up here.
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