We intentionally slept in today. The hotel provides in room breakfast so we purposely did not request ours until sometime between 9 and 9:15. It was a little bit late, not arriving until almost 9:30. We showered and got ready to go before breakfast arrived so once we finished eating we were quickly on our way. Since we were staying a second night at the Spindrift, today’s itinerary only really involved things in the immediate area. The main destination today was the 17 Mile Drive, a coastal road which travels around the Monterey Peninsula through Pebble Beach and Pacific Grove, CA. The plan was also to hit some wineries in the area.
We were less than a mile from our hotel when we made our first stop at Lovers Point Park, a small park that sits out into the bay in Pacific Grove. We stopped here for a couple of geocaches but ended up staying for the scenery. We watched a seagull pull a starfish off of the rocks along the rocky shore and we were mesmerized for a few minutes watching this bird trying to eat the starfish. We then watched a father, young son, and dog play in the water. The kid had a wet suit on (the water is pretty cold) and they had a surfboard. The dog seemed more excited than the people to be in the water. We also noticed that there were dozens of squirrels at this park which was unusual being so close to the water. The squirrels actually went right down to the waters’ edge to get whatever it is they were eating and these squirrels were not only pretty tame but they were pretty fat. You don’t usually see fat squirrels, these must be very used to people and our food.
After about 45 minutes in the small park looking at the water and taking pictures we were back in the car. We stopped about 2 minutes later for another awesome view and then we stopped every 1-3 minutes for the next couple of hours. There were tons of pullouts and little parking areas near beaches where you could get out and walk around and despite being so close to each other, each one seemed to have a different view than the one before. For much of the drive golf courses came right out to the waters’ edge and in places the greens were in between the road and water.
While the road does pass through the gated community of Pebble Beach, there is a fee to enter for non-residents. The $9.75 toll was a small price to pay to drive this route, which is privately owned by the Pebble Beach Corporation. The road twists and turns mostly along the coast but does occasionally go inland a mile or so away from the water. Since the road does pass through residential areas (rich ones), the route is marked by a red line down the middle of the road. As long as you follow the red line you’ll stay on track. Early on in the drive we pretty much had every stop to ourselves. There were very few people but as the day went on the pull offs became more and more crowded. We were surprised to see just how many Japanese tourists were out here. We think there were more Japanese than anyone else. We wondered if the Japanese have as much trouble driving on the “wrong side” of the road as we had while we were in Japan. (In Japan the drivers drive on the left side of the road but the cars are set up like ours, drivers on the left side. So you are half backwards over there, much like the Japanese driving over here must have felt). Along the road there are 21 major stops, each marked with a sign which corresponds to a paragraph or two that is in the brochure they give you when you pay your toll. One of the stops was at Bird Rock, which we found interesting yet smelly and a little bit disgusting. You look out over a huge rock out in the bay where harbor seals, probably hundreds of them sit out in the sun. Even though these seals are probably 100 yards out to sea, the stink they put off is pretty bad and you can smell them from the parking lot. The rock is also home to hundreds of birds which pretty much use the rock for a giant bathroom all day long. The rock is stained white from the birds and the bottom part is covered in seals.
Another busy yet interesting stop was called the Lone Cypress. This is one of California’s most enduring landmarks where a lone cypress tree sits on a rocky perch, where it has sat for more than 250 years. Along the way we got some bad news, not really bad news for us, but bad news because Chris got a call from work, a place we had completely forgotten about until today. We handled that as best we could and made a couple of other calls to hopefully get that issue taken care of, but we will probably have to deal with it a little more tomorrow.
After finishing up with the 17 Mile Drive, we noticed that we were running out of time in the day. So we decided to skip the wineries which is a good thing because we always end up buying more wine than we should at those places, and we headed back towards the hotel. We stopped at a post office for some post card stamps and we ended up staying there for nearly 15 minutes. The line inside was super long and one customer in front of us wanted to put a tracking number on his letter. This should not normally be a problem, the problem with this particular transaction was that he had mailed his letter several hours before and realized now that he needed a tracking number. One of the two clerks spent about 5 minutes sorting through the pile of letters looking for his so that she could put a tracking number on it. She found it and this made for some interesting entertainment for Chris, while Jackie sat in the car wondering what was taking so long. As we were getting ready to head back to the hotel we saw a sign for a farmers’ market, so we went to check it out. We hit up an ATM as we were getting short on cash (we never carry cash anymore) and we went to check out the farmers’ market. We ended up buying lots of stuff and had we been closer to home we would have bought much more. We got a gyro, a falafel sandwich, a couple of cupcakes for later, a pint of huge raspberries, some trailmix, hummus, and pistachios. Much of this would be our dinner.
We then made a beeline for the hotel because from 4:30 to 6 they have free wine and cheese. We made it back easily and enjoyed a few glasses of wine with some other travelers. We met a couple from Sonoma County, CA who were getting away from their kids for a few days as well as an older couple who now live in Florida but are originally from the NYC area. We talked for a while with each couple and when 6:00 came around and the free wine was done, we went upstairs to the rooftop of the hotel where there is a nice terrace overlooking downtown and the harbor. We fed the seagulls for a little while with crackers then walked across the street for another bottle of wine. We ended up talking to the clerk in the liquor store for awhile and he explained to us why the 17 mile drive is called 17 mile drive even though the tolled portion is less than 17 miles. As it turns out the drive originally began at the Naval Postgraduate School in nearby Monterey. The tolled portion is less than 17 miles but still bears the name. We headed back to our room where we lit a fire and drank our wine while writing up our story for the day.
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