EXCERPT FROM MY BOOK: OUR SUMMER IN CARMEL, AMAZON.COM The square mile incorporated city of Carmel-by-the-Sea, in addition to the 120 galleries and art studios, also claims two stage theaters, the internationally acclaimed Bach Festival, the equally renowned Shakespeare Festival, a music society, and an annual art festival among its more prominent cultural events. This focus on the arts is not a recent Chamber of Commerce effort to boost tourism. Unlike other California real estate developments around the turn of the 19th Century, from the onset Carmel was a settlement of artists. The orig [View Full Entry]

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Left Monterey at 1830 on Monday. No wind at all so we motored all night to Morro Bay. The bar was calm so we motored in and picked up mooring balls at the Morro Bay Yacht Club. Nice seafood dinner ashore. We find we are in need of additional fuel filters - Echo is eating them up, so we are waiting today for them to arrive. Plan to push on to Avila (Port San Louis) soon. All of us are happy and healthy. No drama yet. Bonnie, Dick, Brian, Karla and Dave [View Full Entry]

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On my California trip earlier this summer, I spent an afternoon at the Monterey Aquarium. Most of the pictures turned out blurry (apologies in advance) because of the lighting, but I thought I would share a few anyway. [View Full Entry]

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The highway n°1 is nice ride but apparently very frequented by the bald and the beautiful... every second car was a Porsche... now explain me why you ride such a great car on a street where you can't drive over 35 mph due to the curves and the speed limits ... I feel sorry for the poor boxster motors... We stopped in Monterey for lunch and found out the the Californian coast must be the new Côte d'Azur or Rimini with all the Frenchies and Italians squirming around. In the late afternoon we entered splendid San Francisco!! The last stop on [View Full Entry]

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20/07/09 Monday Day 340 After checking out of the hostel we headed only around the corner to Avis to pick up our rental car, which turned out to be a Ford Focus automatic. We were going to head north a bit but since we’re handing it back on Saturday we decided to head south instead. Getting out of San Francisco was pretty easy, again thanks to my trusty phone sat nav! First stop on the way down was Santa Cruz. We had thought about staying here but it was a bit too close to San Francisco for us to stay. We [View Full Entry]

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The day started off with disappointment: all of the campgrounds between SF and Monterey were full (all but one were first-come first-serve, so this time it was not due to our lack of planning regardless of an inability to do so). Scrambling to find somewhere to sleep, we found the library in Monterey had free wireless internet and located a campground called Laguna Seca 10 minutes away near Salinas, CA. As we pull up to the campground with fingers and toes crossed, we were greeted by a very nice ranger who must have had a very strong prescription for medical marijuana [View Full Entry]

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This past weekend my parents and Jim and I drove up to Monterey to visit my daughters and their families and my brother and his family. We took off early Friday morning and had to make the obligatory stop for coffee. Of course, then two hours after that, we had to make the obligatory stop for a potty break. And so it was...We drove up Interstate 15 to I-210 and eventually met up with Interstate 5 that we took North. We stopped in Buelton for lunch and more coffee and were back on the road again. All along the way, we [View Full Entry]

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Well then! Today was once again fantastic. Jordan, Michael, and I woke up at 7 30 and rushed out to Monterey for our 18 000 ft skydiving adventure. BUT it was so foggy that we actually couldn't jump. We were all VERY disappointed, but in the end I think it was meant to be. Turns out the same company does 18 000 ft at the space center in Fla. so the 3 of us are meeting up in August and we've already paid so it's definitely something to look forward to. We went to the aquarium though, and saw lots of [View Full Entry]

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We last left you in Phoenix, where, on our final day, we went to the botanical gardens, perched out on the edge of the desert. It combines all sorts of weird and wonderful plants and flowers, with even more weird and wonderful huge glass sculptures, shaped and coloured in a way to make you feel like you're walking through Wonderland. We sat under a pavilion overlooking the desert, waiting for sunset. We were hoping to see the unusually shaped cactuses silhouetted against a sky of reds and oranges, and we were not disappointed; it really was the perfect desert sunset. The [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Monterey last night and are happy with our $59 a night hotel. This is a slow time of year for the area and there are good deals to be had in nice places. Our drive up started out slow with bumper to bumper traffic through L.A., but after that it was all wonderful. I loved Santa Barbara, wish we could have spent some time there. Dave, we drove through Goleta but didn't have time to look for Deckers...maybe on the way back. We were on 101 so we saw lots of agricultural areas and dark fertile soil. The [View Full Entry]

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