Getting out of the house...

We have been spending lots of time at home, and I've been spending lots of time at school, so we decided to get out for a bit this weekend.  Not knowing people has made it a bit tough to have a social life, but we are working on it.  Through mutual friends in San Francisco, we recently met a couple who just moved to Monterey from Brooklyn, so we gave them a call and the four of us decided to explore Monterey together today.  It was so much fun!

The drive there is really nice along CA-1 -- just under an hour -- and it passes through a heavy agricultural area, so even though we had already visited the Farmer's Market this morning, we stopped off at a farm and got more tomatoes, garlic and persimmons on the way.  Cannery Row was our first stop, and we basically walked with tunnel vision through this highly touristed area.  We ended up down at San Carlos Beach, which is a popular beach for scuba certifications, and it was pretty cool to see so many people out there training.

After a lovely lunch outdoors at a BBQ joint on the lighthouse avenue strip, we headed out to Pebble Beach/17 Mile Drive.  There were tons of surfers and tons of kelp/seaweed as well!  Someone was actually surfing with a paddle (paddleboarding-surfing?), which inspired me to want to find a wetsuit and take paddleboarding lessons; it looked like so much fun!  Continuing our way along 17 mile drive we also saw an enormous colony of sea lions out on this rock (pictured).  It's hard to make them out in this picture, but you can make out the shapes of their heads looking up from the top of the rock...and basically, most of the brown (yeah, a huge area) part of the rock is made up of hundreds of sea lions lying on top of one another:

I have never seen so much kelp either!  I'm pretty sure that Monterey Bay is home to a kelp forest, and this is some of the thick rope-like kelp along the shore.  Apparently kelp in this area can grow 10 to 12 inches per day and can get to be as tall as 175 feet...

The Lone Cypress Tree was an interesting sight as well.  It is the icon of Pebble Beach and is 250 years old.  It is pretty cool as it looks like it is emerging from rock:

California is a beautiful place and what made today even better than just enjoying more of our beautiful new home state was enjoying it with new friends as well!