Having finally left the magnificence of San Francisco and the edgy Oakland, I found myself bus-bound for Monterey, on the central Californian coast, about 4 hours away. More specifically, a small little hideaway town called Carmel-by-the-sea, where Gabe (Dan's big bro) and wife-to-be Cathy, lived.
You'd think I'd be able to manage a 4-hour bus journey without any hassles. Think again. I was on a 'stopping all stations' bus bound for L.A. and our first stop was a short 20 minutes at Santa Cruz. Time enough for me to nick across the road to the Subway fast food joint to grab a sandwich for lunch. Now just as we had pulled into the bus station, another bus had also pulled in, also bound for Los Angeles - this one 'express'. Now, the bus driver did say something about what Bay number we were in, but I had my headphones on and missed that crucial bit of info.
Bet you can see what’s coming from a mile away!!!
Returning from the Subway, I noticed a heap of people boarding an LA bus. I join the queue and sit down. As the bus pulls out of the station and the driver navigates thru the side streets to the main highway, he is welcoming everybody 'On board the Greyhound Express to Los Angeles. EXPRESS!!! HOLY SHIT!! Thankfully the driver had only gone about two blocks, and was able to pull over and let me off. I'm sure it would have been a funny-as-hell site to see me sprinting down a side street, with a 1/2 eaten sub in one hand, CD Walkman cables dangling all about my body, trying to hold up my shorts with the weight of my walkman and wallet in my pockets dragging them down.
Luckily, the other bus was still there, just boarding folks as I arrived back at the station. Phew! No further dramas entailed, and I arrived safely in Monterey, where Gabe picked me up.
It was an unusual time for me to arrive in their life again - one week before their wedding. Slightly stressful I'm sure for a guy who was a brief acquaintance from 4 years ago to lob up needing a crash-palace for a night or two. So i am extremely grateful for them that they could even put me up for one night of the two i was planning to stay in the area.
In the lead up to this trip, whenever I mentioned that I would be staying the Carmel-Monterey area, the unanimous response was "Oooh, wow, you lucky bastard, that's a really, really nice spot". Carmel-by-the-sea is a bit of a yuppie-playground of sorts. The village became a bohemian retreat after a serious earthquake in 1906 forced artists to find a cheaper place to live. Since then, it has become a quintessential example of a self-ordered Californian community, driven by the dreams of a sophisticated upper class. Local by-laws ensure it remains rustic and picturesque - there are no streetlights, sidewalks or mail delivery service (every one has a post office box). Very quaint indeed.
The town of Monterey is situated at the edge of Monterey Bay, the USA’s largest marine sanctuary. It is this richness of marine diversity, along with enormous sardine populations that originally gave this town life back in the 1800’s, fame in the boomtown era of the early-mid 1900’s, and sustains it mainly as a tourist town to this day.
Cannery Row is Monterey’s heart and soul. In a thirty-year period, the sardine industry and its canning operations turned this sleepy little enclave into a hustling and bustling, albeit very smelly, metropolis, peaking in the late 40’s with an annual sardine catch of 250,000 tonnes.
The town really hit national and international fame with famed-author John Steinbeck’s novels ‘Cannery Row’ and sequel ‘Sweet Thursday’, recalling empathetic tales of the drunkards, ne’er do wells, and bums with hearts of gold who lived in the town during this era.
While I was back in San Francisco, I purchased these books with the idea of getting to know the background of the place before I arrived. I was also told that ‘Cannery Row’ in particular was an essential piece of Americana writing, which intimately captured a time and a place in the nations history, heart and soul. That couldn’t be any closer to the truth. While sitting on the beach directly behind Cannery Row, I finished the last few chapters, and could vividly imagine the characters, so well depicted, being a part of this town.
The cannery’s have long since closed down due to over-fishing and population depletion, but the town still thrives on tourists traveling down the Central Californian coast, stopping by to check out the restored and renovated cannery buildings and in particular the Monterey Bay Aquarium, noted to be the 4th most visited tourist site in the state, having some 2 million visitors every year. It is amazing.
Heading south from S.F. to L.A., Monterey is en route to Big Sur, one of the most gorgeous stretches of cliff-top coastal road you could ever imagine. Figuring that as the Greyhound bus takes the inland route, Cathy took some time out of her busy working and wedding planning schedule, and took me on a spectacular drive down Highway 1, stopping several times to satisfy my shutter-bug photographic psychosis. The way this highway hugs the cliffs, there are points where you think that at any minute now the soft earth is going to give way and send you and your vehicle tumbling down to the jagged rocks below. It didn’t (obviously), but with the Californian coast sitting right on the earthquake prone San Andreas Fault line, you can imagine it’s only a matter of time.
As mentioned, Gabe and Cathy’s hospitality could only extend one night, and I checked in to the HI hostel, which turned out to be a rather fortuitous turn of events. But more on that later.
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