Day 310 – 07 June 2010: Pebble Beach, Pacific Grove and the wrong way around

In the morning I take the car on ’17 Mile Drive’ at Pebble Beach. As it is a privately owned community of golf courses and large houses, nearly all of which are gated, there is a $9.50 charge to enter. The US Open is being held here next week and the tents and fences are being put up around the Pebble Beach Links course.

Not all the homes on Pebble Beach are luxurious, but those on the coastline tend to be massive and are probably worth $10 to $20m, or at least they probably were before the real estate crash. One of the homes hidden away off 17 Mile Drive is for sale at $1.6m, though it wasn’t near the size of the seaside houses.

Though the coastline is very beautiful, it is not out of the ordinary for northern California. The centre piece is the ‘Lone Cypress’, a 250 year old tree standing out at the top of a rocky point. The rocks on which it rests have been artificially reinforced, the marketing men needing to keep the tree alive as the symbol of Pebble Beach.

There is a cool breeze and it is quite foggy today, so it is not the best day for the visit, though I have some fun at one of the numerous official viewing sites teasing the seaside chipmunk and sea bird population by pretending to have some food. This was at ‘Seal Rock’, another chunk of rocky coastline though with a small sandy beach, so named because of a seal colony that inhabits a large rock protruding out of the ocean a hundred yards or so from the edge of the tide.

Is Pebble Beach worth $9.50 to take a drive around? Yeah, even if it is just to see how you could live if you had the money...though it’s perhaps a locale you would choose only if you liked Golf.

After Pebble Beach, I visit Pacific Grove, a small seaside town with some of the oldest homes in the area – dating all the way back to 1880s, the middle ages in American terms. Most have a Victorian summer house look to them, though the choice of colours can be more flamboyant than that would imply. There is also a smattering of Art Deco architecture to add a bit of flavour. It looks like a posh retirement village, though the rocks that make a cove of the small beach are referred to as ‘Lover’s Point’, and there are some young families and kayakers on the sand. When I return to my car parked on the roadside, I find that I have a ticket for being ‘the wrong way around’, i.e. facing traffic on my side of the road. Mr Eastwood, another northern California town needs you.

I have booked a 16 day bus tour of national parks of the west with Green Tortoise starting from San Francisco. However, the tour doesn’t include Yosemite, which is only a couple of hours away, and I have been told I should go, and I have a couple of days before I need to be in SF.

I stop for the night at Merced, which apparently has some sort of historical significance, but now just looks like a town of motels. Indeed, my motel is the cheapest one I can find on ‘Motel Drive’ ($50).

For dinner, I find a Thai restaurant. Thai food in Thailand is light and subtle, but this one piles on slodgy and over flavoured portions.

 

at far left, parked the 'wrong way'

at 'Lovers Point'

the roadside wildlife

Pebble Beach and Pacific Grove Pictures

Day 309 – 06 June 2010: Monterey Bay

Down in Monterey Harbour I have a brief walk around before going on a kayak tour of the bay. There is a festive atmosphere around the old town, with a band playing on the bandstand at the bottom of the pier to a busy crowd. The canned fish industry was the origin of Monterey’s wealth, but the tinning works are now the restaurants and souvenir shops. It’s not cheap tat that they sell here, but some of your more imaginative, robustly constructed and pricier tat. I do get a t-shirt emblazoned with shark jaws for $20 though.

On the kayak tour, the guide is an older lady in her late fifties I would say. She has probably retired from her ‘proper’ job and taken this up as a fun hobby that earns her some spare change. She is very friendly and informative but has a disconcerting habit of laughing at the end of each sentence even though there is nothing obviously funny about what she is saying.

The harbour is famous for its submerged mangrove forest, a densely packed habitat for sub aquatic life and a meal ticket for the seal and sea lion colonies. It also popular for divers and there are many dive boats around us, though it does strike me that it would be easy to get entangled in the densely packed plantlife below us.

This year, there are only a handful of seals about while the sea lions number in their hundreds. The seals are inquisitive and swim closely around our kayaks, with our guide accidentally hitting one with her paddle. The sea lions, most of which are adolescents but are still double the size of the seals are, in contrast, entirely unwelcoming. And they smell. As we round the rock pier on which the sea lions gather, I am relieved when I get far enough away for the stench to whither.

It’s very windy today. Despite having ruined a camera after being dunked into the sea the last time I was on a kayak when I was in New Zealand, I have brought my new camera which I bought in a mall near LA, this time taking the precaution of keeping it in a dry bag. However, this means that every time I want to take a picture, which with all the seals and sea lions about I do often, I have to stop to take it out. This means the wind blows me all directions, sometimes spinning me around in circles. With one hand holding my camera, I approach a gang of adolescent sea lions playing off the rock pier and a gust takes me directly towards the middle of them. All but one bolts off like a circle of skaters suddenly splitting out to all corners of the rink, but the last one hangs around for a few moments to aim a protest bark or two in my direction.

There are remnants of old demolished tinning works along the coast, neighbouring the expensive hotels and restaurants built in typical Californian style wood panels and carved balcony banisters. The ruins of the tinning works, which are no more than blocks of concrete, are still there because of strict planning laws in place presumably to retain remnants of Monterey’s history. However, it is clear commercial interests prevail in the end, even if it does take a few decades.

For dinner, I go to an English pub in town, which is populated largely by drunk twenty somethings. However, it sells Strongbow cider, the most widely sold cider in the UK. This has never been my favoured cider, but it is cheaper than at home, a reflection of the British Government’s tax policy on alcohol....however, it also tastes worse than at home.

Day 308 – 05 June 2010: No cheap motels in Monterey

Continuing northwards up the Big Sur, I stop for lunch at the imaginatively monikered Rocky Point. There can’t be many restaurants in the world better situated than here, with outdoor deck seating overlooking the Pacific as it ends against the wall of the rocky rising coastline. The food is impressive too, having been served a luscious bit of swordfish. Considering the setting and the quality, you could expect the price to be somewhat four starred, as in ****in ‘ell!, but in reality it’s about the same as a decent pub lunch in the UK.

I struggle a bit today after last night’s entertainments, and stop at the upmarket Carmel to recuperate on the beach for a while. I chiefly know Carmel as being the town that Clint Eastwood briefly became the mayor of after the locals got fed up with the previous incumbent passing a series of ludicrous laws like not allowing people to wear sandals in the town, or some such.

There is a genteel feel about Carmel, although it is a very popular stop and I have to park on the street as the beach car park is full. The homes around here can be worth millions of dollars, but there is nothing overtly opulent about Carmel, just an obvious tendency toward tidiness. The architecture is what I have come to think of as traditionally American, perhaps born out of nostalgia for the prairie town.

By late afternoon, I reach Monterey, the cheapest motel I can find being the Quality Inn, for $69. This is more than I wanted to spend, but even the Travelodge wanted $125 and it didn’t look any better than the hostel I stayed at in LA. The Quality Inn looks like luxury in contrast. Even here in a relatively expensive part of the US, I can’t help but reflect on how much more you pay for even the most second rate accommodation in most of the UK.

I have dinner at a California Pizza Kitchen, a popular chain. Starting with an appetizer of Artichoke Hearts, these turn out to be deep fried bread crumb constructs which really do go right to the heart of the artichoke, the bit of it in the middle of the bread crumbs being about the size of the last bone of my pinky.

The pizza I order inevitably comes heaped with meat toppings and is cheesily tasty, but a bit too dry with little evidence of the tomato sauce base.

more highlights from the Cali Coast

 

on the beach at Carmel

More Pics: California Coast (Big Sur) to Monterey 

Day 307 – 04 June 2010: Highway 1 & The Big Sur

It is only today that I start to see the real beauty of California’s coastline, where the sea dramatically collides with the red rock mountain terrain, while the highway bends through carved out niches. I imagine this is one of the more accident strewn stretches of highway in the country, not so much for its blind bends, but for the distracting quality of the landscape which has me making several hasty detours onto stop off points at the side of the road.

Along Highway 1 is the diversion of Hearst Castle, a monument to garish opulence built in the 1920s at the behest of Randolph Hearst, the founder of the publishing empire. I say I stopped at Hearst Castle, but actually I stopped at the castle’s visitor centre. The castle is perched at the top of the hill rising up from the visitors centre, and is accessible only by purchasing a ticket for a bus tour. I notice that there is no mention of the one-time bank robber Patti Hearst at the visitors centre.

A few miles up the coastal road is the beach home of a colony of Elephant Seals, so named because of the bulls’ large blubbery trunk like nose. This is the highlight of my day. They are a grumpy lot, continually nipping at each other and the males, which can be up to 16 ft long and 6,000 pounds, make a flurry of obnoxious noises. The infants and adolescents are mostly light and silver coloured, while the females are malting at this time of year, so look like they have some sort of skin disease. The colony are densely packed onto the thin beach, huddled together like a closely knit if cantankerous family. I am sure things get quite vicious in mating season.

I find a campsite in the wooded valley just off Highway 1 and buy a tent from the camping store at the top of the campsite. The store owner sells me one that he says his son used once for $25, which turns out to be $15 cheaper than my camping spot. When you consider that a lot of people here have large gas guzzling and richly kitted out camper trucks (it wouldn’t do them justice to call them vans), camping can be an expensive hobby in the US, especially on coastal California.

The setting is a forest of sycamore and redwood trees, with a shallow rippling river running through the middle of the site. There are no cooking facilities, but there is a bar restaurant, where I spend the evening drinking JD & cokes and talking Rawwwk to two guys who, despite a twenty year age gap between them, both agree that ‘Zep ruled man’. They also shared a fondness for Rush though.

Link to Elephant Seal Video

Day 306 – 03 June 2010: Loosening my belt in Santa Something

Today I start heading northwards, stopping at Santa Barbara for lunch. Santa Barbara is an upmarket looking town with Spanish influenced architecture lining the high street. However, there are quite a lot of teenage loiterers, as well as young women dressed in very short shorts. Disconcertingly, many of them seem to be walking around with their mothers.

Further north, I decide to stop for the night at another Santa something, though this isn’t one of the well known ones, it being a town of shopping plazas. There is a rodeo nearby this weekend, and the motels are busy, though I manage to find one for $44 including tax. There aren’t too many countries in the world where you can find an en-suite room with a comfortable double bed and a TV for this much, though the Best Western wanted to charge me almost $100.

Across the road from my motel is a self styled ‘saloon dining house’, which looks like my best bet for dinner. When I go in, it is clear that they don’t get too many Brits here, as the young waiter looks at me with polite curiosity when I speak to him. He tells me that soup and salad comes free with the main meal, but I am quite hungry so I order a burger. When I get the soup though, I start to think I might have been over ambitious, as it is a thick beef and vegetable soup served in a pot the size of a large saucepan. This is big enough itself to be my main meal, but just in case it comes with a bowl full of spicy Mexican beans, to be mixed with salsa if you so desire. By the time I am finished with the soup, I am reluctant to even look at the burger I will be presented with. I had forgotten about the salad, but it comes out after the soup dripping with dressing, which is how I was brought up to eat rabbit food anyway.

The burger is presented to me and looks quite frightening. 14oz – that's about 400 grams you metric types – and that doesn’t include the masses of cheese, tomato, lettuce and pickle etc piled on top of it. Just in case I didn’t have enough to eat, there is a hefty side portion of Tex-Mex rice and round fried potato slices. I like American beef, even if it is mostly factory farmed, and I feel it is a challenge to try to finish the burger, although I am now having to loosen my belt. It is delicious, but I can’t finish it. It is a good thing that I didn’t order the appetizer I had been considering, which was listed as four large prawns served with eight ounce steaks bits. Eight ounces of ‘bits’?

I had started to think what a bargain this was at $15, and enough to feed three reasonable appetites, when the waiter collects my unfinished meal and feels obliged to tell me that dessert is also included if I felt like having anymore. I feel the urge to spontaneously combust.