The Inn at Spanish Bay is a Pebble Beach golf course resort built near the Pacific Grove town line. A public access boardwalk from Sunset Drive runs along the sand dunes above Asilomar State Beach to Spanish Bay. 17-Mile Drive and Sunset Drive form the road boundaries of Spanish Bay Resort on the Monterey Peninsula.

Google Maps showing Spanish Bay Resort, Pebble Beach at lower left of image. [click on image to open full-size].

This is not a hotel review of The Inn at Spanish Bay. This is another post in my Loyalty Traveler series “At Home He’s a Tourist” where I share the sights of the Monterey Peninsula from my walks around local communities near my home.

Walking to Spanish Bay, Pebble Beach

Asilomar State Beach and Sunset Drive see a steady stream of cars on any evening with clear skies as locals, workers, tourists, surfers and stoners come down to the wild western coastline to watch sunset.

Pebble Beach has a $9.25 car fee to enter the gates into the private residential lands of this scenic and exclusive southwestern point of the Monterey Peninsula. The famous Lodge at Pebble Beach can be seen from Carmel Beach, but natural barriers make it difficult to access the Lodge walking along the coastline. And climbing up the bluffs to the Pebble Beach Golf Course is certainly frowned upon.

The Inn at Spanish Bay is easily approached by foot or bicycle and there is no entry fee required into Pebble Beach for walkers and cyclists. Spanish Bay Resort was developed in the late 1980s during the years my wife and I lived away from the Monterey Peninsula while going to college and working as teachers in small fishing villages in Maine and north coast California in Humboldt County.

Resort development in Pebble Beach is tough to get through environmental impact reviews. Just recently a project to expand The Lodge at Pebble Beach, the Inn at Spanish Bay and a new build hotel resort for Cypress Point have made headway.

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My hotel stay mistakes are relatively infrequent in recent years. The dumbest mistake I ever made was on our 1989 honeymoon in London and thinking a hotel mini-bar was free. Somehow free booze on the Pan Am flight translated in my jet-lagged head to free booze in our London St. James Court hotel room. We drank over 100£ of mini-booze for a major buzz before I finally asked a housekeeper if there was a charge for drinking all those little bottles of alcohol.

Possibly an equally big mistake occurred this week when I was pitched a Hyatt Vacation Club timeshare presentation on Christmas Day after checking in at the Hyatt Carmel Highlands Inn.  There was a call to our room about an hour after arrival and my wife was told that I had a coupon waiting for me in the lobby. There was no mention of Hyatt Vacation Club in the phone call, but I knew that is where the desk for HVC is located when Kelley told me where to go for the coupon.

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Yesterday was bird day afternoon along the Big Sur coast of Monterey County. The wind blown waves made whale spotting difficult. To compensate for lack of whale sightings was a marvelous display of birds, thousands of gulls, soaring along the coastline cliffs along 40 miles of coast from Carmel Highlands south.

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This has been a week of visitors and local sightseeing around the Monterey Peninsula for me. My sister wanted to see whales when she arrived in town. We drove to Point Pinos in Pacific Grove and saw spouts from at least six whales immediately upon arrival to the beach. I pulled out the binoculars and my sister and I watched gray whales heading south. The gray whale migration is in progress to Baja.

I’ll get back to regular posting on Loyalty Traveler by Wednesday, December 28. The weather is so gorgeous that I am spending all my waking hours out and about and unchained to my computer.

Brown pelican at Monterey Fisherman's Wharf.

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This year we are staying home in Monterey for the holiday season and welcoming family to our locale. That means hotel stays, restaurant dinners and outdoor activities. Our ten day weather forecast for the Monterey Peninsula shows no rain and temperatures in the mid-60s next weekend. This has been a gorgeously clear sky December on the central coast of California.

Many visitors come to Monterey for the Monterey Bay Aquarium on the famed Cannery Row. Here is my photo walk along the less touristed southeastern half of Monterey’s Cannery Row named after John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel.

Cannery Row Monterey

Cannery Row is a half-mile stretch of oceanfront road on the northwest end of Monterey. A century ago this parcel of Monterey developed canneries for processing sardines from Monterey Bay to feed the world. The street was called Ocean View Avenue up until 1958 when the name changed to Cannery Row in honor of the novel by Monterey County’s John Steinbeck. The road name is still Ocean View Blvd. in Pacific Grove where the town line begins just west of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

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Passports with Purpose is currently running its last week of fundraising to raise $80,000 for building two libraries in Zambia. After 9 full days of raffle ticket sales the donation mark is only $25,000 or 31% of the way to this year’s goal.

Please contribute $10 if you can.

Hyatt Gold Passport sponsored Loyalty Traveler this year with a prize of 110,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points. Top hotels in the Hyatt chain offer a free night for 22,000 points. There are also about 10% of Hyatt’s nearly 500 hotels globally in the category 1 rewards group for only 5,000 points per night.

My World in a Library

I grew up as a dependent child of a U.S. Army sergeant. Nearly every year our family moved to a new military base and I attended a different school. I had attended 12 schools by the end of 10th grade. Many of the details of those towns and military bases have been forgotten. My most vivid memories tend to be the home where I lived temporarily and the local library.

Books were my anchor.

In the desert of southern New Mexico on the White Sands Missile Range I read Mark Twain’s  Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels and developed the wanderlust motivating me and other middle school friends to hike into the Organ Mountains and explore mountain streams and valleys and old mines.

In Germany when I was 14 I scoured U.S. military base libraries around the country for the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hermann Hesse and Jack Kerouac. Occasionally I could raise the money to buy a colorfully covered English langauage novel from a German bookstore, but that was an infrequent event. Libraries kept my house filled with books and music I could not afford, but I could take books home and experience places and ages while reading books in my possession two weeks at a time.

Libraries gave me access to books and places and experiences I might never have dreamed otherwise.

I found my dreams in books. Words let me access the world and the ages, no matter where I was living.

Los Angeles Public Library with 'Library Tower' skyscraper in background.

“Books invite all, they constrain none.” is saying etched in stone above the Los Angeles Public Library door.

Related post: Win 110,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points with a $10 Purpose. (Nov 30)

Daraius Dubash at MillionMileSecrets.com has published a number of interviews with travel bloggers on his website and now glimpses of me are online in his post “Earn and burn your miles and points.”

I guess I should have talked up hotels more. Being in new places and seeing how people live and work in different environments and cultures is still my primary objective for travel. Nice hotels are a bonus.

My favorite question from Daraius was “What would your readers be surprised to know about you?”

Here is another thing I realized is characteristic of my travels. I spend a lot of time in grocery stores wherever I go. I buy most of my food at stores and prepare it myself when traveling. That keeps travel expenses way down.

While I generally can’t talk much about fine dining and hotel restaurants, I have extensive experience with grocery store shopping in many countries.

Grocery shopping in Australia.

Yesterday I flew SFO to ORD on an American Airlines 757. The flight was totally booked and I had a middle seat. As if that were not bad enough I had this additional seat handicap with my tray.

Brother can you loan me a tray for my drink on this four hour flight?

Nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed. - John Lennon

A couple of weeks ago there was a Tip/Wag segment on the Colbert Report praising Spirit Airlines new revenue stream with its $14 million flying billboard ads on the exterior of Spirit Airlines planes. The piece got me thinking about how hotels could place large billboard ads on the exterior of their hotels, particularly for the side of the building that does not offer the preferred view for the hotel.

I had planned to write this up as a satirical piece.

Tip of the Hat to J.W. Marriott L.A. Live for promoting alcohol in the area of the city’s highest concentration of homeless people.

No need for satire since this practice is alive and well in Los Angeles where an 18-floor high Bud Light advertisement covers a large portion of one side of the J.W. Marriott. Here is a photo link from www.banbillboardblight.org showing the Bud Light billboard on the side of the J.W. Marriott L.A. Live. I wanted to snap my own photo, but I was entering the freeway in a rainstorm when I saw the Bud Light image.

Downtown Los Angeles – Homeless capital of the USA

I was in Downtown Los Angeles this past weekend for Blog World Expo 2011. This was the first time I have been in Downtown LA since 1977. Perhaps the centerpiece of the downtown revitalization plan is L.A. Live, a $2.5 billion entertainment complex with theaters, restaurants, music and sports venues and hotels including the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton situated next to the events center and Los Angeles Convention Center.

Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott at L.A. Live - Downtown Los Angeles

I stayed at the Sheraton Downtown, about six blocks north of the L.A. Live complex. My first night in Los Angeles I went walking randomly around the streets to see what downtown L.A. looked like these days. The architecture was striking.

Los Angeles Public Library 1925 - U.S. Bank Tower (Library Tower) 1989

Los Angeles Central Library was built in 1925 on the site of the 1898 California State Normal School (college for teacher education). The Central Library building was devastated April 29, 1986 in an arson fire that destroyed 370,000 books and documents. The city of Los Angeles allowed the tallest skscraper on the west coast to be erected as part of the funding for the Downtown Los Angeles library restoration.

Los Angeles Public Library 1925

Across from the library is Bunker Hill, the center of the Los Angeles financial industry.

Bunker Hill skyscrapers are center of financial district in downtown Los Angeles.

Library Tower is the local name for the U.S. Bank 73-story skyscraper. This is the tallest skyscraper on the west coast at 1,017 feet.

U.S. Bank Tower, aka Library Tower (1989)

There is a lovely fountain winding down between skyscrapers and a grand stairway or escalators for the steep climb up Bunker Hill. There was no running water in the fountain and apparently I didn’t even take a photo of the stairs. I was too busy looking skyward.

At this point I could have asked directions to the Walt Disney Concert Hall which is considered an architectural beauty designed by Frank Gehry. But I didn’t.

I am a wanderer and I didn’t pull out my phone to check directions. I just started walking and within a few blocks I had left the skyscrapers and found myself in the streets of no name people. I was kind of hoping to find Los Angeles City Hall and see what the LA Occupy movement looked like. There was no need to find an encampment of people around City Hall.

I walked across Main Street in downtown Los Angeles where the street addresses change from the urban upscale west side addresses loaded with fine dining restaurants, hotels, shops and banks to the east side addresses where the racial makeup of the people on the streets was predominantly black and the businesses are primarily liquor stores, corner markets, city public works services and food banks.

The activist saying “Occupy Every Street” is something that has obviously been happening around Los Angeles long before September 17, 2011 launched the Occupy Wall Street movement. Block after block I walked was filled with homeless men and women living on the sidewalks. There were literally thousands of people who were living in tents, blankets, plastic tarps and cardboard shelters.

A gesture of kindness and salvation appeared as a dinner meal on the sidewalk. A dozen people who had been resting alongside the walls of buildings converged on four large foil food containers. I happened to be walking past just as the first person was removing foil from one of the lids and I saw it filled with spaghetti. I wanted to take a photo, but thought I should let people get their meal with dignity and anonymity. Looking around I saw at least a dozen more people trying to cross the street in the middle of the block to get a portion before the food trays emptied.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did. It never will." - Los Angeles Library fountain.

There are no photos to share of this walk down East 5th Street to South Central and back to the west side of downtown LA along East 6th Street. This probably ranked in my Top 10 for walks in places where keeping it real could have gone real bad.

Google Maps - Los Angeles Mission

I just have this innate desire to see how people live where ever I go and sometimes that compels me to go places where most locals will tell you to avoid.

Nobody bothered me and nobody asked me for a handout despite being surrounded by so many needy people. People were living their lives on the streets, socially interacting – or not. Many of the individuals on the streets were visibly wasted, many just looked sickly and hungry.

Mostly there were men on the streets, but probably about 10% to 20% women on some streets. Only a small proportion of people on these streets were non-black guys among the thousands of people on the sidewalks.

Outside the Los Angeles Mission were hundreds of people lined up for dinner service. The LA Mission website states 73,489 homeless people are living in the Los Angeles area. I estimate I saw a few thousand of them in the 20 or so blocks I walked.

The concierge at the Sheraton Club Lounge told me the downtown LA area is so much nicer without all the homeless people who used to be around a decade ago. Perhaps he hadn’t walked a few blocks east of the hotel in some years.

Los Angeles theater on South Los Angeles Street, Downtown LA.

Turns out that back on the west side of these numbered avenues are loads of nightclubs. On Saturday night when I met up with BoardingArea bloggers RoadWarriorette, The Wandering Aramean and AAdvantage Geek, we walked about ten blocks from a nightclub where there was the closing evening Blog World Expo party back to the Westin Bonaventure. We passed hundreds of young partiers, the majority being Asian, dressed for entertainment at clubs with $10 drinks and long entry lines where you might get in if you are part of the select crowd.

On my walk back to the Sheraton Hotel alone on a Saturday night at midnight I passed by three different groups where a nicely dressed young woman was getting sick on the sidewalk as her friends surrounded her trying to help.

The juxtaposition of young, apparently well-to-do women coming into downtown LA to party and have a good time to only find themselves out on the sidewalk unable to stand and sick on the streets while a few blocks to the east there are thousands of people struggling with life on the streets made an impression.

Downtown Los Angeles

Sunday morning I left downtown Los Angeles to drive home to Monterey.

The last image I saw of downtown LA was the J.W. Marriott at L.A. Live and an 18-story Bud Light billboard on the outside of the luxury hotel as I entered the 110 freeway.

Honestly, I was glad to be leaving downtown LA.

Fort Ord Dunes State Park is a beach wilderness park established in 2009 on the shore of Monterey Bay a couple of miles north of the city of Monterey. The Fort Ord Dunes park encompasses almost 1,000 acres of shoreline west of Highway 1. These dunes in the former Fort Ord military base had beach rifle ranges during the 1970s when I was a teenager living in Marina, the adjacent town north of Fort Ord.

Here is a photo walk of my stomping grounds around Monterey as I walked north from Sand City to Fort Ord Dunes State Park a couple of weeks ago.

View of mountains beyond mountains from Edgewater Shopping Center, Sand City, CA

Edgewater Shopping Center in Sand City is one of the biggest changes in the Monterey area since 1980. This is where the local Costco is located.

Many California cities are unrecognizable after the past thirty years of growth with population doubling, tripling, and even more since 1980. This is what happened in Salinas, California a dozen miles inland from Monterey Bay.

The towns of Monterey, Pacific Grove, Seaside and Marina along the shores of Monterey Bay have basically not increased population at all. Monterey actually had a population decline in the past decade.

This area is beautiful with forests of Monterey pines and Cypress trees up to the shoreline.  Beauty comes with a high price. There are few job opportunities and a high cost of living. This is a place where the Highway 1 traffic jams result from workers driving in the morning to the Monterey Peninsula cities for restaurant, hotel and tourism jobs and leaving in the afternoon to go home to places where they can afford to live.

View of Monterey Peninsula from Sand City.

Sand City beach path looking south to Monterey. (Best Western Monterey Beach hotel is located directly on beach.)

Fort Ord is where I was born. The army base was the largest military base in the country to be closed at the time it officially shut down in September 1994. The closure impacted my family when my parents relocated to another area to be near military medical facilities.

Highway 1 Mileage Marker near Seaside High School.

Sand dunes are the prominent coastal feature between Monterey and the Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing in the center of the Monterey Bay crescent. I spent hours upon hours walking through the sand dunes north of Fort Ord between Marina and Castroville when I was a student at Seaside High School in the 70s.

The 1970s were an environmentally destructive time for beach dunes outside the military base too in those years. Beach parties were a regular event in the Marina dunes and the popular entertainment was partying around bonfires while watching people try to drive trucks to the top of steep sand dunes.

Marina Beach was designated a state park in the 1980s. Large portions of the sand dunes areas are off-limits to allow plant restoration and reduce erosion.

View from Sand City north along Monterey Bay.

Monterey Bay sign: Danger - unstable cliffs.

Only in the last couple of years did I learn that our prominent sand dunes and landscaping feature called “iceplant”, abundant around Monterey Bay, is a non-native invasive species primarily native to South Africa and Chile. I don’t know why it is called iceplant, but if you have ever driven on it, you might realize why it has the name. There are hundreds of species and at certain times of the year they produce colorful flowers.

Flowering iceplant on Santa Cruz shoreline

I have stunning pictures of vibrant purple iceplant flowers in Pacific Grove, but I couldn’t locate them for this post. I noticed the other day I have 120,000 photos on my portable hard drive. I need hundreds of hours to catalog all those photos.

Monterey Bay from Marina to Sand City is a popular place for hang-gliding. The winds blow steadily here much of the year. Fog is common and the summer months tend to be the foggiest months. October to April is a our best weather in between rain storms blowing in from the Pacific. When I look back over years of photos I am always struck by the clarity of the air in January.

Tip for photographers is to come to Monterey Bay and Big Sur in winter as long as you come in between the Pacific winter storms. This is central coast California and sometimes the daytime temperature in winter even hits the 80s. September and October tend to be the warmest months if the fog isn’t present. Our warm weather streak in 2011 was three days in the 80s the week after I took this beach dunes walk.

bike path in Sand City

Portions of the bike path through Sand City are regularly bulldozed to remove sand covering the path after strong winds.

Keep out of fragile beach dunes to allow plant restoration.

It had been some time since I had the kind of alone time I found in Fort Ord Beach Dunes.

Restored dune plants in Fort Ord Dunes State Park.

shared bike and walking path through Fort Ord Dunes State Park.

Fort Ord Dunes State Park

Mt. Whitney is the tallest peak in the 48 states at 14,505 ft. That is one big mountain. And I helped move Mt. Whitney this summer to a new location in California – on Google Maps!

One of the effects of my July ‘Brokeass Mountain tour’ road trip from Monterey, California to Denver, Colorado and back was a couple of hours time spent studying Google Maps and satellite images of the western U.S.

Mt. Whitney, California is one landmark on Google Maps that I noticed was glaringly out of place with its marker directly in the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.

Google Maps (July 2011) showed Mt. Whitney (west of A pin) in Yosemite National Park.

[click on image to see full size]

On the right side bottom of a Google Map is a link to report a problem. I submitted to Google the problem of Mt. Whitney being located about 100 or so miles north on Google Maps of its actual location in the California Sierra Nevada mountain range.

Google Maps emailed me yesterday to state Mt. Whitney has been relocated on Google Maps.

Google Maps shows Mt. Whitney west of Lone Pine, California (November 2011).

When people ask me what I did last summer, I can honestly say I moved a mountain.

Google Maps - Mt. Whitney, California satellite image (Nov 2011)