Day 23: Rude awakening

Day 23 started off with the soothing sounds of a carbon monoxide alarm at 6AM.  The alarm continued to go off (not the little annoying chirp of a low battery, but fully go off) every 20 minutes or so.  Justin eventually called the fire department.  Unfortunately for Kate and Justin, the fireman wasn't hot, but he was able to confirm that the house was clear of carbon monoxide.

We got back inside in time for me to turn on ESPNU for VT's 9AM kickoff.  Kate and Justin wisely headed into the city for a hair appointment and some shopping.

Pacific Heights view from Kate's shopping trip

After watching the Hokies live up to their irritating but recently well deserved nickname of the 'chokies', we headed off to Carmel.  Despite my somber mood, I was able to appreciate some of the scenery...

The sand dunes were an interesting change of pace

Mile 3958: Carmel

Carmel is an interesting place.  There are lots of cool cottages and stuff, and some of them go by names rather than street addresses.  So it would be "The Castaway" rather than "120 5th Street".  I wonder how they do their mail...

Carmel street scene

The other thing to note about Carmel is that its visitors seem to mostly be very well off.  The hotels, restaurants, and shops take this into account when designing and pricing their offerings.  For example, the Tradewinds Hotel...

Strawberries and orchids (?) on check in

Hotel view--nice quaint rooftops etc.  They seemed almost embarrassed to
 give us a room with double beds and no ocean view. 

The concierge was helpful but excessively fancy.  She said that the town was 'at capacity', and that 'if we wanted to eat between 6 and 9' we would have to rely on her help to wrangle reservations.  We decided to try our luck...

I had been dying to try some sushi on the West Coast.  The first place we checked looked super authentic, meaning they had a 100% Japanese staff and a poorly translated menu.  We got the last 2 spots at the bar, and proceeded to indulge (or at least half of us did).

OMG this was awesome.  Best salmon sashimi I've had, yellowtail
was super fresh too.  The bowl is salmon eggs over rice.  YUM!

Kate sat by patiently (thanks Kate), then we headed off to find her something to eat.  Based on Yelp! reviews we landed at a rather fancy place that offered wine tastings and Italian tapas/pizza.  I was a little suspicious when I saw this list of wine regions painted on the wall:

"Napa   Tuscany   Umbria   NORTH JERSEY   Montepulciano  Sicilia"

Having had some Jersey wine, I wasn't sure what that 'region' was doing there.  Nevertheless, we ordered a flight and a pizza.

Napa and Italian reds

We took our time with the flights, but couldn't stretch them out for the 45 minutes it took for the pizza to arrive.  There weren't actually any Jersey wines available--I guess it was the service that was imported from Newark.  The pizza would have been pretty good if it had been warm when we got it.

It was pretty late when we were done, so we called it a night.

Tomorrow:  Do we finally see a whale?