Monterey

Welcome!

Dad, we don't want to go to the aquarium. Aquariums are BORING. You promised that you wouldn't make us do educational things that we don't want to do...

This is the kind of crap I have to fight all the time. I wasn't going to back down on this one, though. I told the girls, "Trust me. This is the best aquarium that you'll ever visit. Just wait, you'll see. We're going."

We had to backtrack about 20 miles South on Route 1 to get back to Monterey. I was nervous about parking, so I had spent a good while researching places to park that could accommodate the RV. Google maps is an amazing thing. I set the view to "satellite" and was able to inspect all of the possible lots until I found one with big enough parking spaces.  A cool trick that I will use again to inspect congested RV driving destinations. Parking was a non-issue—if you don't count the $16 fee. It was a 10 minute walk from the parking lot to the aquarium, so we stopped in to feed Amaya's new coffee addiction (Thanks Neb. It's decaf, but still....).

I don't see what's so hard about parking this thing, Dad.

Do you think 5 packets of sugar will be enough?

The day started off chilly, but Monterey is a beautiful spot. I love it there. As a graduate student, I would almost always bring East Coast friends/family there when they visited me. Tim Farnham, my classmate from Williams who is now a professor of environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College, worked as a tennis pro at Pebble Beach during one of his boondoggles before graduate school. As I recall, his grandmother owned a house right next to the "Lone Cyprus" on 17-Mile Drive that is the symbol for the Pebble Beach Club. I remember that she had a Scottish "house boy" named Duncan who drank a lot of beer with us, and the rest of my memories about visiting there quickly grow fuzzy.

By the end of our coffee break, the sun was breaking through the clouds and we had a lovely, caffeinated walk to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We started right in on what looked like the best exhibit: The Jellies Experience. There was psychedelic music, lights, and art  throughout the display. There were jellyfish in crazy shapes and colors, jellyfish that were fluorescent, and even jellyfish that gave emitted light.  When we got to the end of the exhibit, Keiko said, "That was the coolest thing I've ever seen. This place is awesome. Thanks for making us go here Dad." Go figure. 

We toured the special exhibit, The Secret Lives of Sea Horses next. It was pretty cool, too, but it would be hard to top the jellies. For the most part, these were creatures we had never seen before. I think I had seen a tiny sea horse once as a kid, but this display was unbelievable. I took a lot of pictures, but most of them didn't come out well. This one of the crazy sea dragons was the best. 

Leafy Sea Dragons

Keiko and Amaya were really keen on seeing the sea otter feeding. It wasn't going to start for 30 minutes, but they wanted to make sure that they got pole position, so they camped out in front of the glass viewing window and waited. It was a good thing that they did because the place was packed and pretty soon people were 6 rows deep. The sea otters were cute to look at and swam right up to the window. The feeding only lasted about 10–15 minutes, but we got to meet the narrator woman afterwards and ask her some questions. I asked if they ever give the otters shellfish still in the shell; they only seemed to feed them soft food while we were watching. She answered that they do give them shellfish in it's 'natural' state elsewhere. It turns out that if they give them food with the shells still intact while in the display area, the sea otters use the glass windows as a surface to smash the shells on, and then they have to repair all of the scratches in the glass.

Sea Otter Feeding Time

After a (ridiculously overpriced) cafeteria lunch and a stop by the gift shop to buy two (somewhat overpriced, but totally cool) sea otter t-shirts for the girls, we hit the road. Getting the RV out of Monterey was a bit of a challenge, but Google Maps saved my hide again.

Under the Sea

Really, Dad? You're taking another picture? Really?

 
 


















Our next campground was only about 70 miles North on Route 1, but traffic and the curvy road would mean that we'd have a 2+ hour drive. One thing for sure, it's a lot less nerve-wracking to drive the RV with an adult co-pilot in the passenger's seat.  Rachelle would arrive the next day. Couldn't wait.

Heading North from Monterey