Monterey in December

At the beginning of December, Billie and I spent a couple of days in Monterey celebrating our anniversary (plus a couple of partial days getting there and returning). We had some very nice, celebratory dinners out and spent time relaxing and wandering around the Wharf and Cannery Row, site-seeing and window shopping (and actually bought a couple of things). The weather was partly sunny on our first full day there and very overcast, moving toward rain on our second full day.

We both brought cameras along so we also used our car to search out photo opportunities of a few of the wonderful natural, and man-made (what – you wanted me to say ‘unnatural’?), sights in town and beyond. The photo at the top of this page is of a tiny part of the Cypress Tree forest in the Point Lobos State Natural Preserve located in the town of Carmel, just next door, south.

The street called Cannery Row is so-named because it used to be lined with one fish cannery after another. Those businesses are now gone and have been replaced by hotels, restaurants, gift stores, the Monterey Aquarium, and other tourist shops. Fortunately, there are still a couple of open spaces that have been allowed to return to their natural state and which show a few of the foundation remains of the old canneries.

Mostly natural but with some cannery foundation elements

An artistic rendition of a fishing boat on an old cannery wall

Below are two other images captured while wandering around Cannery Row.

Even though there was rain in the forecast, we decided to head south on the Cabrillo Highway (California Highway 1). Along the way we found this plaque declaring “California’s First Official Scenic Highway is Route 1 in Monterey County from the Carmel River south to the county border.” We definitely found the first 15 miles or so of the stretch of road we drove that day to be attractive and that it offered many excellent photo opportunities.

One of those opportunities turned out to be the oft-photographed Bixby Creek Bridge. I took many shots trying to capture it in a way I hadn’t seen before. I doubt I succeeded in finding a totally unique perspective; this one is my favorite of the bunch.

Here are some other images from the same area.

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At this point, and casting a wary eye at the ever more threatening sky, we decided to head back toward Monterey. Along the way we stopped a couple of times to shoot more photos. Here are two of them:

At about the time the tree skeleton image was captured we began to feel we’d pushed our chances of avoiding the weather forecast about as far as we should and headed back toward our car, about a 15 minute hike away. Just as we got to the parking area it began to rain. We piled into the car and drove back to our hotel in Monterey and our anniversary dinner reservation later that evening.

If you click on many of the images in the post you will see them somewhat larger. Or you can click here to go directly to the San Francisco Bay Area – South gallery in my United States album (in my CedBennett.Photography website) to see many of these photos even larger and more detailed.

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