Day 3: The Soft Spray of the Sea
When last we left our heroes, they were getting ready to drive down to the Old Fisherman's Wharf to take a three-hour long boat ride on the Monterey Princess for a whale-spotting expedition. I generously applied the 85 SPF sunscreen, while Myra maintained her religious objection on the grounds that sunburn is immoral in climates below 90 degrees. (Her nose had somewhat come down from the annoyed bee-stung-me red to a more casualwear pink.) The drive down was a bit tense, as there are two separate wharves, a bunch of docks and marinas, and a sign Myra really wanted to get a picture of that was on a busy intersection and thus hard to acquire in unobstructed form. And there's the Postgraduate Naval Academy as well, whose wrought-iron fence was extremely reminiscent of some of the rich peoples' house fences from Bully: Scholarship Edition - one of the few games Myra and I have played extensively. The second time we passed it, she asked me to sing the bike riding theme, and I knew it. (Oh, some couples build their love and shared experiences on walks in the park and sitting on lakeside benches feeding the ducks - but not us! No ho.) And in addition, there is a big pier on the wharf and a smaller pier, and both have big yellow buildings at the end. But Myra read the map right, and we got to the dock with thirty minutes to spare. (Due to a disagreement over search procedure, I was grumpy at this point - but my grumpy passes like afternoon rain - and the boat company gives free cookies! Yum.)
Two people opened the bolted door and went onto the boat early - I think they were just pushy snobs. We later had more experiences with pushy snobs - but not yet. After a while, a grizzled captain came out and gave a short speech paraphrasable as "Hey - let's be careful out there," and then he opened the bolted door and we went downstairs towards the dock. The sign on the edge of the dock door says to mind the beam - but that beam is WAY above my head. The next two beams, however, aren't enough to give Myra a problem, but many of the rest of us are bobbing and weaving like it's a slow-motion boxing match. We board quickly and are in motion within minutes. We basically drive out of the bay towards open waters, hang out in the open waters, then turn around and go back when someone throws up. I think that actually was the signal.
But soft, I should back up. When Myra and I were waiting for the boat to arrive, she suggested that it was slightly imprudent for the boat company to serve coffee and cookies before a long boat trip. I wondered why. She said people might throw up. Now I, apparently descended from hearty Finnish viking stock, have utterly no experience with seasickness or motion sickness. I barely understand how people might feel sick at all. My experience with throwing up is all food-based - I can't imagine feeling so dizzy that puking was required. Myra said she felt it sometimes, but never enough to actually lose lunch. So we talked about it for a second, and she speculated that six people might throw up on the cruise. SIX. I told her, not in so many words, that I thought she was out of her frickin' mind. I asked her for a minimum number of pukers, and told her I'd lay ten dollars down on it. She said four - but was unwilling to bet. I pressed with no result, and as we boarded the boat, the bet was unmade. We sat down on the bench on the outside of the cabin, and a woman sitting next to me put her coffee down right on the bench. Being annoyed that she might risk burning my legs with a sudden jerk of launching (as the boat hadn't moved yet), I remarked as such to Myra - but by the time the boat started moving, she had picked the coffee up again. And the boat cruise went uneventfully for about thirty minutes, after which we were far enough out that we bumped into a small grey humpback whale breaching the water straight up into the air to a height of three or four yards. Very impressive. (The rest of the whale sightings consisted of blowhole geysers. Teases.) Anyway, back to the main story - at about 90 minutes into the voyage, a young male who had been roving the deck for some time lurched out of the forward entrance to the cabin and puked on the side of the ship. Not over the railing, mind you - just straight down on the side of the ship. AND again. AND again. AND again. He clearly had no business on a three-minute cruise, let alone three hours. So he got hustled towards the back of the boat, and the noble deckhand came out with a bucket of water on a rope. Before he took the first bucketful of seawater and threw it down on the deck, he calmly advised us that maybe directly downwind and down the deck from the spill site might not be our most opportune seating arrangement right at that moment. Myra and I retreated to inside the cabin, and after a few minutes, Myra re-emerged onto the deck, which was now nice and shiny and wet. I joined a few minutes later, after the floor further up the deck had been rinsed more.
It was about this time that word reached the middle of the boat that a second vomiting had occurred, near the back of the boat. There was some speculation among Myra and myself that this was the prior vomiter, but my own instinct was that he wouldn't have gotten up off the floor if he'd still had some lunch in him. Besides, a middle-aged man had run to the snack counter at the back of the cabin while I was still inside, laid belly-down on the counter, and reached down and back to get paper towels. Nobody would do something so undignified for a complete stranger, my opinion ran. I saw an older woman in a purple coat hanging around him later, and she looked uncomfortable - so she is my prime suspect as a second puker. However, she apparently managed to put her head over the railing, as there seemed to be much less effort to clean up any mess back there. Myra looked somewhat assured that our non-bet would go her way - but the captain started talking and advised us to hold onto the rails, as he was preparing to take the ship on a 180 and begin our travel back to shore. Myra noted somewhere around this time that someone had brought a blueberry muffin on board, but had dropped it near to where I was sitting. True enough, when I discovered it, it had been under my hip for some time, and had become deformed. So the puking was not the only form of nutritive abuse, I assure you. But in any event, the cruise back was a lot cleaner and happier (as the sun was facing us this time) and a lot more quiet (apparently because the whale extras had shot all their scenes). Last notable thing that happened on the cruise was that I couldn't stop humming Sea Cruise by Frankie Ford. Myra might have been in a situation where a specific song would have similarly pervaded her consciousness, but she hadn't heard it yet.
After we got back to shore and passed once more under the two beams of death on the gangway underneath the dock, we took a stroll along the merchandising walkway of forever - the string of stores and stalls on this pier devoted to the purchase of things with the word "Monterey" printed on it. I initially considered this a prime location for souvenirs, as was its purpose, but I was eventually persuaded of two things. First, half the items I was considering for purchase were fragile enough to break during transport through airport luggage systems. Second, if you took the word "Monterey" off the item, it wasn't usually very good. In many cases, it felt like I could just go home, get a cup, write "Monterey" on the side and it would be identical. So ultimately, all the kitsch looked kind of irrelevant. So I walked up to the top of the pier, played a kick-ass game of Scrabble on my phone, and watched real pigeons pick away at the beach rocks below while the human pigeons shopped in the stores. Myra found a few diamonds in the rough, however - her reward for checking each store and a testament to her good memory in unearthing the shop with the best prices. We watched pigeons together for a bit, then walked back to the car.
Ah, the revelation.
That morning, she had expressed some degree of frustration that I had been driving the club car each day (with its pedals so close to the bench that I had to pick my leg up to change from start to stop), and she had been driving the rental. I had driven the rental once around in Seaside, but the seat had been so high and the shift console so close in that it felt very uncomfortable. And I'm already pretty tentative when I drive, and Myra isn't - when I'm comfortable physically, it gets more tentative and Myra just gets annoyed. But on the other hand, she quite fairly wanted to take pictures of the road and couldn't do so while driving. So I had already offered to drive back from the wharf, discomfort or no. It was still daylight when I opened the car door, though - so the controls were more visible. Hey - why are there two levers for moving the seat back? Pull - hey! Did the seat move up? Push - it moved down! It's sort of an air pump system - about ten pumps downward and the seat is at a FAR FAR more reasonable height. (I think one of the problems foreign car makers still have with addressing the American audience is to make cars that handle not just Americans of size, but of height. The whole bone structure of a six-foot-tall human is not made for a Corolla, in my opinion.) But anyway, having adjusted this car's seat, getting inside proved to be a satisfying fwoomf and a very comfortable cockpit. "I could drive this car for the rest of the trip!", I triumphantly declared. And, with one exception, that's what I did. We drove back to Black Bear Diner, enjoyed a second meal at this really good restaurant, and then returned back to the resort - where we made a disturbing discovery.
WE - GOT - JACKED.
Our golf cart, which we parked in the same space as the rental, was gone. The parking space we had left it in was empty. So Myra went into the lobby while I maneuvered the rental, and soon she returned, and a young man ran out a side door and jumped into a spare cart. He pulled it around and turned it over to Myra, and I parked the rental and we transferred cargo. While she drove to the room, she shared the explanation offered by the staff. Apparently the carts all have the same keylock, so someone just walked in and drove it away. *sigh* Kind of annoying, really. So we drove back to our room, our 612.
Oh, look - now our neighbors in 612-A (the larger suite) have two carts. And one looks like it's been hooked up to the wall outlet, which translates well as "it ran out of gas". And the other cart has no card in the slot where the staff drops in a card to indicate the match of cart and room number.
Oh yay - remember that I said I'd mention pushy snobs again? Apparently they saw our cart on the way in, realized that their own was mostly out of gas, and they split into two groups - one to drive their own cart back to the room (with either the somewhat good goal of charging it up, or the selfish goal of unloading whatever cargo they had), while the other followed in -our- cart and picked them up to drive hither and yon in their ill-gotten gains. So we snagged their "Privacy Please" sign, and hoped that housekeeping knocked on their door at 5AM. Ah, petty vengeance is ours!
Despite an online request to the contrary, we get no further sunset shots - awww. We sleep, we wake, we shower, we prepare for the Thursday adventures. Today is the only thing I really asked for when Myra started seriously discussing vacation, after we established that the California-Pacific Ocean interface was a little more affordable than the Hawaii-Pacific interface.
I've had a few comments of envy on our vacation surroundings. I offer sincere regrets that our current surroundings are so dang cool. :D (They are rather weak regrets, but they're sincere.)
Two people opened the bolted door and went onto the boat early - I think they were just pushy snobs. We later had more experiences with pushy snobs - but not yet. After a while, a grizzled captain came out and gave a short speech paraphrasable as "Hey - let's be careful out there," and then he opened the bolted door and we went downstairs towards the dock. The sign on the edge of the dock door says to mind the beam - but that beam is WAY above my head. The next two beams, however, aren't enough to give Myra a problem, but many of the rest of us are bobbing and weaving like it's a slow-motion boxing match. We board quickly and are in motion within minutes. We basically drive out of the bay towards open waters, hang out in the open waters, then turn around and go back when someone throws up. I think that actually was the signal.
But soft, I should back up. When Myra and I were waiting for the boat to arrive, she suggested that it was slightly imprudent for the boat company to serve coffee and cookies before a long boat trip. I wondered why. She said people might throw up. Now I, apparently descended from hearty Finnish viking stock, have utterly no experience with seasickness or motion sickness. I barely understand how people might feel sick at all. My experience with throwing up is all food-based - I can't imagine feeling so dizzy that puking was required. Myra said she felt it sometimes, but never enough to actually lose lunch. So we talked about it for a second, and she speculated that six people might throw up on the cruise. SIX. I told her, not in so many words, that I thought she was out of her frickin' mind. I asked her for a minimum number of pukers, and told her I'd lay ten dollars down on it. She said four - but was unwilling to bet. I pressed with no result, and as we boarded the boat, the bet was unmade. We sat down on the bench on the outside of the cabin, and a woman sitting next to me put her coffee down right on the bench. Being annoyed that she might risk burning my legs with a sudden jerk of launching (as the boat hadn't moved yet), I remarked as such to Myra - but by the time the boat started moving, she had picked the coffee up again. And the boat cruise went uneventfully for about thirty minutes, after which we were far enough out that we bumped into a small grey humpback whale breaching the water straight up into the air to a height of three or four yards. Very impressive. (The rest of the whale sightings consisted of blowhole geysers. Teases.) Anyway, back to the main story - at about 90 minutes into the voyage, a young male who had been roving the deck for some time lurched out of the forward entrance to the cabin and puked on the side of the ship. Not over the railing, mind you - just straight down on the side of the ship. AND again. AND again. AND again. He clearly had no business on a three-minute cruise, let alone three hours. So he got hustled towards the back of the boat, and the noble deckhand came out with a bucket of water on a rope. Before he took the first bucketful of seawater and threw it down on the deck, he calmly advised us that maybe directly downwind and down the deck from the spill site might not be our most opportune seating arrangement right at that moment. Myra and I retreated to inside the cabin, and after a few minutes, Myra re-emerged onto the deck, which was now nice and shiny and wet. I joined a few minutes later, after the floor further up the deck had been rinsed more.
It was about this time that word reached the middle of the boat that a second vomiting had occurred, near the back of the boat. There was some speculation among Myra and myself that this was the prior vomiter, but my own instinct was that he wouldn't have gotten up off the floor if he'd still had some lunch in him. Besides, a middle-aged man had run to the snack counter at the back of the cabin while I was still inside, laid belly-down on the counter, and reached down and back to get paper towels. Nobody would do something so undignified for a complete stranger, my opinion ran. I saw an older woman in a purple coat hanging around him later, and she looked uncomfortable - so she is my prime suspect as a second puker. However, she apparently managed to put her head over the railing, as there seemed to be much less effort to clean up any mess back there. Myra looked somewhat assured that our non-bet would go her way - but the captain started talking and advised us to hold onto the rails, as he was preparing to take the ship on a 180 and begin our travel back to shore. Myra noted somewhere around this time that someone had brought a blueberry muffin on board, but had dropped it near to where I was sitting. True enough, when I discovered it, it had been under my hip for some time, and had become deformed. So the puking was not the only form of nutritive abuse, I assure you. But in any event, the cruise back was a lot cleaner and happier (as the sun was facing us this time) and a lot more quiet (apparently because the whale extras had shot all their scenes). Last notable thing that happened on the cruise was that I couldn't stop humming Sea Cruise by Frankie Ford. Myra might have been in a situation where a specific song would have similarly pervaded her consciousness, but she hadn't heard it yet.
After we got back to shore and passed once more under the two beams of death on the gangway underneath the dock, we took a stroll along the merchandising walkway of forever - the string of stores and stalls on this pier devoted to the purchase of things with the word "Monterey" printed on it. I initially considered this a prime location for souvenirs, as was its purpose, but I was eventually persuaded of two things. First, half the items I was considering for purchase were fragile enough to break during transport through airport luggage systems. Second, if you took the word "Monterey" off the item, it wasn't usually very good. In many cases, it felt like I could just go home, get a cup, write "Monterey" on the side and it would be identical. So ultimately, all the kitsch looked kind of irrelevant. So I walked up to the top of the pier, played a kick-ass game of Scrabble on my phone, and watched real pigeons pick away at the beach rocks below while the human pigeons shopped in the stores. Myra found a few diamonds in the rough, however - her reward for checking each store and a testament to her good memory in unearthing the shop with the best prices. We watched pigeons together for a bit, then walked back to the car.
Ah, the revelation.
That morning, she had expressed some degree of frustration that I had been driving the club car each day (with its pedals so close to the bench that I had to pick my leg up to change from start to stop), and she had been driving the rental. I had driven the rental once around in Seaside, but the seat had been so high and the shift console so close in that it felt very uncomfortable. And I'm already pretty tentative when I drive, and Myra isn't - when I'm comfortable physically, it gets more tentative and Myra just gets annoyed. But on the other hand, she quite fairly wanted to take pictures of the road and couldn't do so while driving. So I had already offered to drive back from the wharf, discomfort or no. It was still daylight when I opened the car door, though - so the controls were more visible. Hey - why are there two levers for moving the seat back? Pull - hey! Did the seat move up? Push - it moved down! It's sort of an air pump system - about ten pumps downward and the seat is at a FAR FAR more reasonable height. (I think one of the problems foreign car makers still have with addressing the American audience is to make cars that handle not just Americans of size, but of height. The whole bone structure of a six-foot-tall human is not made for a Corolla, in my opinion.) But anyway, having adjusted this car's seat, getting inside proved to be a satisfying fwoomf and a very comfortable cockpit. "I could drive this car for the rest of the trip!", I triumphantly declared. And, with one exception, that's what I did. We drove back to Black Bear Diner, enjoyed a second meal at this really good restaurant, and then returned back to the resort - where we made a disturbing discovery.
WE - GOT - JACKED.
Our golf cart, which we parked in the same space as the rental, was gone. The parking space we had left it in was empty. So Myra went into the lobby while I maneuvered the rental, and soon she returned, and a young man ran out a side door and jumped into a spare cart. He pulled it around and turned it over to Myra, and I parked the rental and we transferred cargo. While she drove to the room, she shared the explanation offered by the staff. Apparently the carts all have the same keylock, so someone just walked in and drove it away. *sigh* Kind of annoying, really. So we drove back to our room, our 612.
Oh, look - now our neighbors in 612-A (the larger suite) have two carts. And one looks like it's been hooked up to the wall outlet, which translates well as "it ran out of gas". And the other cart has no card in the slot where the staff drops in a card to indicate the match of cart and room number.
Oh yay - remember that I said I'd mention pushy snobs again? Apparently they saw our cart on the way in, realized that their own was mostly out of gas, and they split into two groups - one to drive their own cart back to the room (with either the somewhat good goal of charging it up, or the selfish goal of unloading whatever cargo they had), while the other followed in -our- cart and picked them up to drive hither and yon in their ill-gotten gains. So we snagged their "Privacy Please" sign, and hoped that housekeeping knocked on their door at 5AM. Ah, petty vengeance is ours!
Despite an online request to the contrary, we get no further sunset shots - awww. We sleep, we wake, we shower, we prepare for the Thursday adventures. Today is the only thing I really asked for when Myra started seriously discussing vacation, after we established that the California-Pacific Ocean interface was a little more affordable than the Hawaii-Pacific interface.
I've had a few comments of envy on our vacation surroundings. I offer sincere regrets that our current surroundings are so dang cool. :D (They are rather weak regrets, but they're sincere.)