Visit Date: August 11, 2021
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Brian and Marie came over from the San Francisco Bay Area to stay with us in Santa Cruz for a few days. Their room and deck were right next to our so they got to enjoy first hand the pleasures of grandchildren. Cornelius takes a while to warm up to people but before long he and Jurgen treated Brian and Marie as another of their adult playmates. But we wanted to exercise our prerogatives as grandparents and get away for a day for some grown up time with Brian and Marie. So we headed down to Carmel-by-the-Sea to walk around downtown and enjoy the views. It’s about an hour’s drive south of Santa Cruz, just south of Monterey. Brian and Marie often come here for a weekend getaway.
We walked around downtown and had a nice lunch. There was a sports car rally taking place this weekend and we saw plenty of Ferraris and Maseratis tooling along US 101 and in town. They may have a top speed of 200+ MPH and accelerate from 0-60 in less than 3 seconds, but they were all stuck in the same 30 MPH traffic we were. That’s an indication of a rich area. Carmel wasn’t hosting a rally of fixed up pick up trucks, or rebuilt classic cars; no, they know who their target demographic is: people who can drop $250,000 on a car.
Carmel is one of the California places where rich people have second – or third, or fourth – homes. A bungalow away from the shore may go for a million dollars. A similar house on the coastline can fetch $7,000,000. There are various levels of rich; having a small second home worth 7 million dollars is pretty darn rich.
I may sound snippy about it; I’m not, really. It’s just clear this is not a city I would find my friends living in.
Here are a couple of houses we viewed while walking along the path above the beach. Some owners go with the old-time original look.
Others tear down the original house and build a modern replacement. I like the reflection of the tree in the window.
As we walked along the path above the beach we could see part of the Pebble Beach Golf Course.
A note about the photography. There wasn’t a lot of inspiration in today’s pictures. But I did have fun with the post processing today. Adobe Lightroom recently came out with a major new update which includes masking (selection) abilities. The pictures of the houses all had a bright, glaring sky that needed to be tamed a bit. I used the new “Select Sky” mask and brought down brightness, exposure and a few other sliders. It was way easier than using a brush or radial gradient.
The next day – Thursday August 12 – would be our final full day in Santa Cruz. We spent the day at Monterey Bay Aquarium. More on that in my next post.
