Riding through Monterey

A couple days into our trip to Monterey, we decided to ride the bike path in Monterey and along the coast.  The Monterey Bay Coastal Bike Trail follows the coastline for almost 30 miles of the bay.  In the city, the trail is a wide paved path that cuts through town just a block and a half off of Cannery Row.  We parked south of the aquarium, then rode north through town to the working jetty, and out on the jetty to watch birds and harbor seals.

After riding to the end of the jetty, we rode back through town, but instead of following the bike path, we turned toward Cannery Row.  While it was really crowded in town that weekend, there were surprisingly few cars on the roads along Cannery Row -- maybe because there's so little parking, it's just not car friendly.  So there were a couple cars, motorcycles, lots of pedestrians and us.  It felt like we ruled the road.

On Cannery Row, we stopped to look around a bit.  We found a cinnamon roll shop, a nice pier area, and lots of fantastic people watching.  The tourists in Monterey were much more international than we're used to - we heard European and Asian languages, along with our own familiar English.

From Cannery Row, we headed south along the coast and quickly left the tourist area for a road with the ocean on the right and houses on the left.  I looked at other people's houses and decided which I'd have liked for myself, which I couldn't imagine ever wanting, and which were probably owned by lucky souls who bought them 50 years ago and hadn't done much to fix them up since then but oh how fun it would be to do that now.  Along the way, the coastline was distractingly beautiful.  I kept an eye out for otters, which we didn't see, but I did see seals relaxing on the rocks.

At this point, the bike path was on the road, which wasn't a big deal because everyone drove so slow to enjoy the coastal view.  Only the tour buses startled me as they drove by because they're so big that you can feel them blow by.  We rode all the way down to Asilomar State Park, stopping along the way to look for otters and enjoy the view.  On our way back, we were joined by some motorcycles for a while, and it felt for a second like I was keeping up.

I loved that Monterey was so bike-friendly and made the trip toting our bikes all the way down from Washington totally worth it.  It's the kind of place that's meant to be explored on bicycle -- there's so much to see that you don't want to go too fast or you'll miss it.