Carmel and Monterey

I am very behind in my blogging... This is partly because America (with the exception of San Francisco) have been difficult to access the internet without my own laptop.

I forgot to mention in my Yosemite blog a great man I met on top of the dome, watching the sun go down. His name was Ira...he knew Jim and did a similar job. Ira was a fascinating man, He seemed to know so much about almost everything. He used to work for NASA on their space programme but gave it all ip because he was frustrated with how much America was spending on space exploration when it could not even feed some of its population.

After a great drive from Yosemite, I arrived in Carmel.
It was such an easy place to navigate, so I put my satellite navigation to rest for a few days (I was getting tired of the electronic voice anyway...particularly the way he would pronounce 'route' as 'rout').

Carmel was a beautiful, clean and prosperous area of California. There was a quaint 'cottage' style of living with small general stores and a few theatres, MANY art galleries and the coast....complete with crashing waves of milky white on a scale I had not seen.

The following day I took the 17-mile drive (a route you pay for of private roads and points of interest..golf courses, coastline, etc..

It was a foggy morning but I think this added to the atmosphere when visiting the coastline..the lone cypress tree and my favourite 'The Ghost Tree'(a lone tree with pale bark and no leaves growing from a large rock. I think parts of the route had the same haunting quality of many of the lakes in the lake district early in the morning.

I then explored Monterey (trying not to hum the Sinatra classic, 'It Happened in Monterey..')

It certainly had character and I quite liked it. I walked along Fisherman's Wharf, saw the seal swimming in the sea, ate crab, went to a museum, Cannery Row and finished off in downtown Monterey.

I spoke to a few people..first, a chinese girl from Toronto (also travelling on her own) and then, the owner of the crab restaurant. She informed me of how the tourist season is coming to a close and tourist numbers are decreasing each year..