A nice early start this morning. We were being picked up for our tour to Monterey and Carmel by 8.30 and we had to have breakfast first. Ihop was the choice again as we really enjoyed our breakfast there yesterday.
The tour bus picked us up and took us to the depot ready for the tour. And there we waited for the next hour. The bus was held up in a traffic jam caused by Barak Obama. He was visiting the town and was going by in his car. All the roads were stopped to make way for him. Finally we got on our way over one hour later than we should have. Monterey is a three hour drive south and we were stopping there for 2 hours, driving on to Carmel and staying there for one hour.
The trip was really scenic and thankfully the bus driver stopped a few times for us to get out and take some photos. We travelled along the coast line and the road changed from being sea level to very high…looking down the cliffs to the land and sea below. Monterey was a lovely town built for the cannery industry. Many of the large cannery sheds are now converted to shops especially for the tourists. There is also a big Aquarium there and many restaurants. We chose to have our lunch at Bubba Gumps Shrimp Restaurant. Now that is a great experience including trivia questions about the movie during the lunch time.
We travelled past some very rich properties to Carmel including a private 17 mile road (which we had to pay to go on). The road had 2 big golf courses, one we stopped at to take photos. Clint Eastwood, Nicholas Cage and a few other ‘stars’ own the golf course and it reaked of money! I needed to go to the toilet while we were there exploring and taking photos…so I just used the toilet at the club rooms. They were just like a first class hotel with special cloth towels to dry your hands and extremely tidy and clean. I found out later that we were suppose to use the public toilets! Oops…no one said anything to me so hopefully no one noticed.
As we left so much later in the morning we didn’t get back to San Francisco until 10.30pm, and we still had to wait until all the people were dropped off at their hotels. We were one of the last drop offs. It was a fabulous day! I hadn’t realised that we were going so far, but it is now great to be able to say that not only did we go to San Francisco, we also went down to Monterey and Carmel. Very nice indeed 🙂
