The adventure, day two: Monterey to San Simeon

We woke up late and got ourselves out the hotel and back on the road to Monterey (we stayed in a Hyatt in Marina, about half an hour away). Patrick made a wrong turn somewhere that took us around the back end of one of the military installations, which bloomed with poppies and lupine while farmers worked strawberry fields across the road.

Our plan was to try fitting in the Monterey Bay Aquarium, 17-Mile Drive, and Mission Carmel before continuing south. I wanted to get as much kid-friendly stuff as possible in each day, and hoped that we could do the aquarium before nap, have him nap on the way to Carmel, see the mission, and then run down the coast, with possible running around stops as we drove through Big Sur. John had never been to the aquarium, and Seamus hadn’t been since he was very very small. I love the place and kick myself whenever we go for not going more often, despite the four hours in the car a day trip would require. The aquarium represents the bay it rests on and the deeper offshore ocean waters, and they do a pretty good job at showing not only the “pretty” fish, but the fish that made up the local economy for so long: herring and sardines. Cannery Row now offers tourist schlock and restaurants of varying tastiness, but it’s still Steinbeck country.

The aquarium was fantastic - aside from the usual exhibits, they had a whole installation devoted to sea horses, including tanks of them in various stages of the reproductive cycle. The biggest hit, of course, were the jellyfish.

Seamus and Patty, aka Grandma.And of course on the day my eyes were the most sensitive from the pink eye there were sea otters out in the bay right off the terrace. Lucky were the divers who were out there that day.

We grabbed some burritos and I nursed Seamus down, and we tooled around Monterey and Pacific grove for a while ooh-ing and ahh-ing over cute little houses and nice-looking libraries and schools. I keep telling myself that we probably can’t afford to move and the area is probably plagued with shitty API scores so I don’t explode into tears. No, I will not confirm that. My remaining sane enough to live in our tiny space requires a certain amount of blinkering about other places right now.

Seamus slept through 17-Mile Drive and we began poking our way southerly. On our way down we stopped to watch a group of paragliders ride thermals near Big Sur to plunk back onto Earth at a state beach. “Seamus, look, those people are flying!” Do you any other way to distract a toddler from your breasts while riding in the back seat of an Outback?  If so, let’s have a contest.

We stopped in Gorda for dinner and watched migrating grey whales swim north. And our day ended in the town of San Simeon, where Patty booked us at the rather quite awesome Morgan at San Simeon. Julia Morgan was a local architect who desigened several buildings in Berkeley, the Campanil at Mills College, and this ranch house for William Randall Hearst. Because of the Campanil I have a soft spot for Ms Morgan, plus I’ve visited the vault at Cal’s Department of Architecture and seen some of the hand-drawn elevations in their collection (not hers, but still). The detail of the work - all hand drawn - still blows me away. I fuck up stick figures. So I was happy happy happy to see the hotel festooned with high-resolution scans of her drawings of Hearst Castle, framed like fine art prints. Another point of happiness was the big big bed.