Writing on Sunday morning from an unexpectedly lovely Motel 6 in Salinas, CA, 20 mi. NE of Monterey, where there are affordable motel rooms!  Yesterday was another wonderful day: began by doing major reorganizing of the Prius (my hybrid conestoga), so things are more accessible when I need them.  This always happens a couple of days into the trip, after painful experiences looking for stuff.  It's a great spiritual relief to have that taken care of.  So didn't get going until noon, on another beautiful, cloudless day.

Headed back toward the 17 Mile drive, which goes around the periphery of the Monterey Penninsula
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17-Mile_Drive   http://kestrin.com/wedding/images/pebble_beachhotels_map.jpg
and provides endless spectacles of "the restless sea" (quoting one of the site markers) splashing and foaming around the wildly rough-hewn, and promiscuously scattered, protruding granite rocks, with occasional seal sightings.  Not to mention the really wonderful Monterey cypress forests, which I first saw, strikingly, at Point Lobos on Friday on the way up here.  These trees, native only to this area, seem to me like practice versions of the giant redwoods I look forward to seeing tomorrow, north of San Francisco.  Nowhere near as big, but trying hard to be...and having a menacing tendency to lean over toward the road (and there is much evidence that they do, indeed, occasionally fall over.)  They also sometimes sport a beautiful drapery of "Spanish moss" like trees in the southeast!  One thing is certain, the central CA coast gets a lot more rain than the LA area where I just came from!  It's really green here - the trees, anyway.  The fields are all iconically California golden.

Then continuing up into Monterey itself, I was charmed!  The town reminds me of a New England seaside town, like Portsmouth, NH, for instance.  But the beaches are much more accessible: the road just runs next to the beaches, with parking areas every mile or so.  I'd say, if I could do it over, I'd try to find a job with one of the local colleges (Monterey Penninsula College, or CSU Monterey Bay), become a specialist in marine protists, and live happily in the sea air, sans snow!

Since "sanity" has been the byword lately, I decided not to rush up to Santa Cruz in the afternoon, where I couldn't book a room, anyway, but stay in Monterey.  So got this affordable room in Salinas, which has a lovely entry walk under trees and birds, between my car and the room.  And paid the $2.99 for internet access to save schlepping out to another McDonald's.

The ride into Salinas from Monterey takes one through miles and miles of the flattest terrain I've seen in a long time.  I mean, FLAT, as far as the eye can see...at least right up to the mountains in the distant mist on both horizons.  So flat that a topographical map of the area would just be a blank piece of paper. There is on topography.  And of course, it's all cultivated, with sprinkers going full blast (draining the Colorado River?) and only seedlings showing at this time.  I thought of Steinbeck, who hung out in Salinas, and the depression era "undocumented immigrants" he wrote about in "Grapes of Wrath," one of the few novels I actually finished!

Did a little shopping, mainly to get cash back with my debit card, and was again so inspired by the bilingual verve of the young women at the registers all over California!  Chattering away in high-speed Spanish with the customer in front of me, and then in flawless and always warm and friendly American English, taking care of me (somehow, I'm never mistaken for a Spanish speaker.  Uncanny!).  I thought, I have a Ph.D. but as a hopeless monoglot, would be vastly unqualified to run a cash register in California.  These young women could be simultaneous translators at the UN, but have to settle for minimum wage at Albertson's.

I was all set to heat up my gourmet leftovers packed from Claremont, using the hotplate and saucepan I brought, but decided I deserved a night out, so found a Thai restaurant open late on Main St. in Salinas.
The young Thai waitress also spoke flawless Californian (every other word was "awesome" - a word I noticed I'd never even used describing my Big Sur experience.  Let me correct that now:  it was AWESOME!)

So I returned to the coast for the sundown show, which was lovely even through some clouds on the horizon, and took photos and videos.  These and others will be posted sometime, but my computer is way to slow to handle much photo and video work now.

Well, dear blog reader, I'm sorry to have distracted you from an otherwise worth-while day, but I did want to keep up, if only to unload the brain for the next day's accumulations.

Speaking of which,  having been thinking and talking about Emily Dickinson a lot over the past months, I reflected that it was a good thing her experiences of nature and the world were limited to the relatively modest proportions and pretensions of New England.  I thought, if she witnessed what I had these past few days, her brain would have caught fire and she would have burnt to a crisp.  And that would have been a tragic loss for us all.

Off to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and then on to San Francisco, where I might just leave my heart.
(Have already left my left hip in Riverside).  Catch you later.