Our 9th trip to Monterey Bay Aquarium (our 2nd one this year!) is well underway. As we leave the cheapest motel I could find in San Simeon the place is covered in morning fog. Not living on the coast, we don’t really have a good read on this, and for all we know, the fog is hiding rain clouds just above it. No matter, it’s always an amazing time out here on Highway 1.
Smile and the whole world smiles with you, and maybe those smiles might have the world smiling at you with beautiful blue skies.
Yeah, smiles.
Bellowing and getting in each other’s faces, Elephant Seals are not known to smile. No matter the time of year we stop here, we have seen at least a few dozen of these giants. Just a couple of years ago, we spent New Year’s Eve here, and as the Elephant Seals’ only human visitors brought in the New Year with them. That night, in total darkness, not being able to see 10 feet in front of us, we heard an unfamiliar sound. The next morning, we saw that the females had become mothers during the previous week. Pups were scattered across the beach and were squawking like a gaggle of geese. The herd on this visit is small, mostly juveniles, a few females, and only a handful of males. We spend a few minutes watching two young males squaring off in practice for the battles that will someday give them their own harem.
A rare photo of me looking landward instead of seaward out here along the Pacific Ocean.
The fog, slow to lift in places along the California coast, is welcomed by us desert dwellers. It adds to romanticism. Highway 1 is a twisting, windy road not built for the faint at heart. At moments, we are not much above sea level, and then seconds later ride high above the beach, tracing along the steep mountainsides. From fog, the road emerges into the sunlight, and the waters in the cove below become a clear turquoise invitation to pull over off the narrow road to gaze at the beauty stretching before you. It’s a dramatic place to be every time.
Something about pampas grass brings yet more happiness into this car crawling up the coast.
Some things never change, such as our need to stop far too often to admire the view.
Famous bridges greet us in images seen a hundred times before. Even on rainy days, these vistas are spectacular. From Winter and Spring to Summer and Fall, we have traveled this highway through all types of weather, but never have we been less than awestruck at the sights this genius of a well-placed road delivers to those of us willing to traverse its serpentine route. On this particular drive up to Monterey, we are not without purpose and try earnestly to curtail our stops in order to arrive in Monterey on time for a scheduled reservation.
We could be stuffed to the proverbial gills and still, we’d have to stop at the Big Sur Bakery on our quest to try every pastry they make.
At the time, we weren’t quite familiar with Garrapata Beach and how vicious it could be. Knowing what we know now at the time of this writing (see below), we’d never think this was a good idea to have one of us dash over to some rocks that had just been surrounded by churning waters for a quick photo, but here it is today.
We’ve arrived at the Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey instead of the aquarium because we have a date with Derek M Baylis.
Derek is a thing, actually, as in a 65-foot sailboat. Caroline and I have booked a couple of places for the Science Under Sail program hosted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Members could sign up for a journey on a research sailing vessel to learn about the Monterey Bay ecosystem while out in the bay. Luck would have it that the captain asked for a volunteer to pilot this craft, and I pushed Caroline to volunteer faster than that smile would show up on her face, but it turns out that once she took the helm, that smile arrived at lightspeed. I don’t know if I’ll ever see a deeper look of wow on her face for the rest of our lives. Okay, so there was that whale that showed up between us and the shore at some point that the staff told us was a baby humpback.
While out on the sailboat, we looked at water samples under a microscope. The ROV that was to offer us a look below didn’t work out as the conditions of the bay were too murky to be viable, and so instead, we took a wonderful trip out on the bay (a National Marine Sanctuary) and learned about what was out here under the surface. The entire expedition lasts about 4 hours and is well worth the price of admission. It is only about 4:00 when we return to shore, and with 2 hours until the Aquarium closes, we drive to Cannery Row, find parking, and pop in.
Last year, we were members of the Aquarium, which allowed entry for one year, along with the benefits of receiving discounts on whale-watching tours and the Science Under Sail program, as well as early entry and evening visits on select days for members only. We took advantage of as many of these offerings as we could, considering we had to drive across two states to visit. The Monterey Bay Aquarium was one of our first stops on Caroline’s first visit to the United States back in 1992. We try to visit at least twice a year, sometimes we get lucky and might find ourselves here three times in one year. We dine on Fisherman’s Wharf and check into our hotel for an early morning wake-up call.
There will never be a time we don’t spend an inordinate amount of a visit entranced by the Kelp Forest. It was getting late by now, and it turned out that some of the fish had already gone to sleep. Yep, that’s the way they sleep.
Disclaimer: This post was not written on or near the date it shows up on my blog. This particular sequence of days wasn’t written about until September 2022 as I was trying to better catalog our travel images on this site.
Additional info: In November 2022, I found a composite post of the three days I wrote four months after our trip on February 26, 2005. I grabbed what was there, merged it into this post, and deleted the other.
