This day was kind of a bust, unfortunately, except it still met the baseline of ‘hey, new places to see’ and ‘let’s putz around doing fun things’. Got up, got cleaned up, got the inn’s free continental breakfast.  Headed out. It was raining pretty hard.  We went to the drugstore, then the gas station. 

Dad was in the army in the late ’50’s, and spent about six months at the Foreign Language School at the Presidio in Monterey, studying Spanish. (and then ended up not using it, doing cryptology instead) So visiting Monterey was very much about revisiting old haunts. The last time he’d visited was a trip to California with my mom probably 40 years or so ago. But two major problems now. First, Monterey is so built up and changed now that nothing was recognizable (until we randomly found ourselves in an old suburban neighborhood, which Dad declared ‘looked like the Monterey I remember’). And we couldn’t get into the Presidio, even to drive around – post 9/11, it just wasn’t open to civilians. I suppose if we’d planned better, we could have applied to make some sort of visit, but we had not done that. So that was a bummer, Dad had really been looking forward to that.

Then to the 17 mile drive, which also wasn’t great, because they kept routing us away from the shore, because of the ongoing giant waves and people actually getting swept out to sea.  (Also, had the same issue of being so built up now we wouldn’t have been able to see much anyway. Again, Dad very disappointed.) We didn’t finish the route, but did end up in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where we walked around for a bit and I bought some fancy sandalwood soaps. Carmel was cute!

Then up to Santa Cruz. Again with the waves. We’d heard from all sorts of directions that, just the day before, part of the wharf had collapsed .  (We were really doing poorly with our timing.) But we checked into the Marriott, which was super nice and so were the staff.  One issue was that it was Christmas Eve, so we quickly made sure that, if nothing else, we could get dinner (if we needed to) and breakfast there.

We walked over to the boardwalk, which was still open (not swept away), then then had Mexican for lunch (BBQ pork tacos, chicken quesadilla) as I slowly slogged through the process of booking the Alcatraz tour for Friday on my phone.

We relaxed during the afternoon  I had a much needed mocha.  Then time to find a restaurant open on Christmas Eve.  Turns out that Open Table was pretty accurate as far as options available.  Nothing close by, but we booked into Mozaic not too far away and got an Uber there.  Mozaic was a Mediterranean restaurant.  Our server was a little ditsy, and in general, the service wasn’t great, but the drinks and food were.  Dad started with his rye negroni (which he had to explain to the ditsy waitress, but it came out great), and I had one of their special cocktails, a  grapefruit cosmo, really good.  Then Dad had a lamb shank – which he managed fine one-armed, very tender, but it still finally got the deed done. (However, we added to the list of medical disasters – Dad had a temporary crown on his front tooth that he’d been assiduously protecting by not, for instance, eating things like pizza – but this otherwise tender dish pulled off his crown. Argh.)  I had an ‘Alicia salad’, with chickpeas and avocado and stuff.  We both had wine as a second drink.  Then split baklava.

Another Uber back, quite a bit more expensive than the first, but captained by a lovely Asian lady with poor English, but great conversational ability.

And off to bed, no stockings up, no Santa expected.