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Monterey, California
I don’t need to walk around in circles, walk around in circles, walk around in circles, walk around in
Another “weekend trip” slideshow starts with, well, another weekend trip, this time to Monterey, California. About an hour and a half south of San Francisco (or, more accurately, San Francisco International Airport), Monterey is a nice enough town set on an absolutely spectacular bay. Sure you have all of that John Steinbeck “Cannery Row” atmosphere, but honestly that’s little more than a distraction from the sea otter filled sea beyond.
Occupying part of an abandoned cannery on Cannery Row is the world famous Monterey Bay Aquarium, where the lines to get in and the crowds inside are always worse than you think they will be. Inside the aquarium remains one of the nicer ones in the country but, just like the rest of Monterey, it’s hard to compete with that glorious bay just outside the windows.
South of Monterey is Carmel, a pretty town on a pretty coast and also home to Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo or, as most people are more likely to call it, the Carmel Mission. Dating back to 1797 when this part of California was still part of Spain, the mission still stands, despite the posted ominous warning outside that reads: “This is an unreinforced masonry building. You may not be safe inside or near unreinforced masonry buildings during an earthquake.” A not so subtle reminder that despite standing unscathed for 221 years now, at any moment the mission of that mission might just be to crush everyone inside.
Monterey Bay is more than Cannery Row and world famous aquariums and nearby potentially homicidal missions and those giant hubcap pancakes at Loulou’s Griddle in the Middle (seriously those giant hubcap pancakes are really, really big), it is also home to the world famous 17 Mile Drive where you pay $10.50 to drive around and see even more of the coast than you can from the canneries.
The star of 17 Mile Drive isn’t the golf course or the shorebirds but instead the Lone Cypress. Most pictures of the Lone Cypress show it, well, alone, although in reality it seems as if might actually have had a friend not all that far away all this time. I guess changing its name from the Lone Cypress to the Not Completely Alone Cypress Since There’s Another Cypress Like Twenty Feet Away is probably not something that the 17 Mile Drive people are all that interested in doing.
Sure Monterey is nice and those giant hubcap pancakes alone might be reason enough to fly across the country (full disclosure: I had the damn good french toast and not the pancake), but as always, there is another reason lurking just underneath the surface to justify this trip. For years and years, I have been taking my father to see hockey games in different hockey arenas as a series of awesome birthday presents, and this year we headed out to Monterey as part of a trip to San Jose’s fine enough SAP Center to watch the local San Jose Sharks lose 6-3 to the visiting Minnesota Wild, one of the dumber named professional sports teams out there (seriously what is a “wild” anyway).
As for the game, there was nothing especially special about the SAP Center, although the players did emerge from the open mouth of a shark at the beginning of the game (as if it was vomiting hockey players) and the zamboni was tricked out with a fin and menacing grin, which was honestly pretty awesome. Go Sharks Go.
If you’re going to be in San Jose, you might as well stop by nearby Cupertino to visit the Apple Park Visitors Center where, from the roof, you can get a glimpse of the edge of the giant circular building for yourself.
I have never owned a Mac, but I have otherwise been an Apple guy for quite some time. I bought the first iPod that was compatible with PCs (way back when they still used a FireWire connector and you had to use the awful MusicMatch software to sync songs) and I have been an iPhone guy since the very first one (running iPhone OS 1.0) and straight through today. And the Apple Park Visitors Center (designed by Norman Foster) feels in an odd way more like a homecoming or pilgrimage than just a reason to kill an hour before going to a hockey game.
We’ll close out the Monterey/San Jose pictures with a few last views of Norman Foster’s Apple Park Visitors Center in Cupertino, where the feature attraction involves iPads with augmented reality that take a monochromatic model of Apple Park and turns it into a color, rendered 3d flyover.
