Go west, young man:  2013 vacation, Day 6

It may have been 115° in Las Vegas Tuesday, but Thursday morning in Monterey was a much more coastal and bearable 60.  L got us all moving fairly early, and we were at the doors of the Monterey Bay Aquarium before ten, giving us plenty of time to look at things, and we needed it.  The aquarium is huge as aquariums go, with tons of exhibits.  L remarked on the way the descriptions and displays had been made kid-friendly without dumbing them down to the point an adult would be bored.

As soon as we got through admissions, we found a docent with a pet stuffed octopus, at which M was skeptical.

The aquarium inhabits a couple of old sardine canneries on Cannery Row, right on the shore of the bay.  Since telling the story of the canneries fitted in with the history of the bay, the renovation left in place several of the cannery boilers that had powered the plant’s sardine cookers.  One of them was marked with the name of the Agnews State Hospital and dated 1913, two years after the hospital reopened following its collapse during the 1906 earthquake and subsequent rebuilding.  Was the boiler made for the asylum and never used?  No source I can find has anything to say about it.

One of the many sections included, naturally, schools of sardines and anchovies, the fish that had fed the local economy for the first half of the twentieth century (the fish population collapsed at the end of World War II from radical over-fishing).  They swam in closely packed schools, like . . . well, like sardines, except when a passing shark in the tank caused the school’s normal mill to break and reshape itself like a lava-lamp blob out of the shark’s path.  The tank water was too murky for good shooting, so I couldn’t capture these amazing maneuvers.

Other areas of the aquarium held equally fascinating displays of jellies and seahorses, who are often stranger than imagination. 

M, of course, just had to visit the penguins, penguin fiend that she is.  The informational card told us that much of the aquarium’s current collection had come to them from New Orleans, after Katrina ruined the aquarium there.  The enclosure also had a number of puffins, a bird that looks like a badly told joke.  The tufted puffins, which I didn’t get a good shot of, look even more preposterous than this.

Outside, we could see half a dozen seals and some cormorants sharing a rock just off the observation deck.

One last thing to mention was a group of art objects made of trash collected from the ocean, mostly plastics, and meant to raise awareness of just how much old plastic goes into the oceans every day and what it does to marine life.  The most spectacular piece was one by an artist who re-created Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa using only scraps of photo-degraded plastic.

We ran down in the afternoon and needed to get on up to San Francisco anyway, so we had a late lunch at a brewpub further down Cannery Row, retrieved our car, and drove on up the Pacific Coast Highway toward the city.  As it was the Fourth, EVERYbody had come out to whatever sliver of beach they could find and the road was lined with parked cars.  North of Santa Cruz, I spotted a fingerlike structure against the sky, and as we got closer we found it was a lighthouse, the Pigeon Point Light Station.  Unfortunately, the tower is closed ever since a piece of the cornice fell off in 2001, but we did get out and walk around the grounds.

At the foot of the path, there was what must be one of the last remaining in-service phone booths in the universe, and I had a sudden insane desire to text its whereabouts to Clark Kent, just in case he needed one.

We got back in the car and started off again, winding through truck farms and vegetable stands and suburban communities until we finally got to Daly City, where we found that Malvina Reynolds’s complaint was still a valid one.

I was fine driving in, until we hit the elevated part of I-280 and my vertigo flipped out again at being in the air.  I managed not to have a complete freakout before we got down to ground level again, and we got to the hotel (the San Francisco Marriott Marquis) with no more than the usual amount of frustration at the thousand little streets and alleys of SoMa, most of which seem to go any way but the one you want to go.