TriumphAnt

(All photos here -- except the two Wii titles at the end -- are by yours truly. Where photos are found through a link, they are someone else's.)

Driving from San Jose to Carmel takes one through some remarkable landform changes. Around San Jose – and this is something you can see from the air – the landscape is either the Santa Cruz mountains or their arid lowland environs. It is, in a word, dry. And scenery, dry-wise, is a variation on the colour brown. The greenest things you’ll see in the area are the golf courses or, as you get further out of the San Jose area, the heavily irrigated vast farmlands from which most of North America’s romaine lettuce (if you believe the highway-side billboards) comes. Inbound by air, you frequently overfly giant green polka dots, another dry land hallmark where farmers are irrigating with massive sprinkler systems that feed water from a central point through a long, pliable pipe that is held up on flimsy, wheeled A-frames. The entire pipeline is “walked” around in a giant circle by the motorized outermost strut as it waters the entire crop.

Here’s one.

And here’s their effect from the air.

But as you get closer to the coast – the Monterey Peninsula and the Carmel surroundings – the land becomes almost lush. At one point about 20 minutes out of Carmel, we passed through a stand of cypress that could easily have passed for a Louisiana bayou.

I suppose Carmel, California crossed the divide from “nice place to visit” to “legendary destination” when Clint Eastwood was elected Mayor for a two-year term in 1986. But Dirty Harry links aside, Carmel is also a beautiful place, peopled by the beautiful and obviously wealthy who walk beautiful and obviously expensive pedigreed dogs and drive obviously expensive sports cars (beautiful to their fans) that litter the curbside parking spaces, and where even a “fixer-upper” two-bedroom home can command an asking price of over a million dollars in local realty listings.

That being said, if you’ve visited Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, for all intents and purposes you’ve done Carmel. It’s a town whose main street consists almost entirely of small, specialty stores – a kite store, a music box store, for example – and restaurants, cafés and small galleries of widely diverse artworks. But where Niagara-on-the-Lake offers the Shaw Festival and nearby wineries as its lead draws, Carmel offers the nearby Carmel Valley for wine aficionados, its western border – a stunning Pacific sea-coast beach – and a quartet of golf courses whose roster of names is led by Pebble Beach, which is to North American golfers and fans second only to Augusta in terms of its awe-induction factor. (The others in the foursome are Spyglass Hill, Spanish Bay and Del Monte.)

While we were there, the front page of the town’s quaintly-named weekly newspaper, the Carmel Pine Cone, headlined two stories: one was about a teen-ager who had taken a too-fast spin in the family’s Oldsmobile SUV along a scenic coast road called 17-Mile Drive and, with none but his peers aboard (illegal for a teen driver in California), rolled and totaled the car. But it’s what he did next that earned him the headlines. He photographed the wreck, then uploaded the picture on his little corner of the MySpace website, with a caption congratulating himself under the banner “Mr Indestructible”. Oh those wacky teenagers and their antics!

The second story was about a local resident who has applied for a building permit to add a minuscule extra 12 square feet to her home’s bathroom to accommodate a washer and drier. It was only when she applied for the permit that she discovered the home’s previous owner had illegally turned a built-in single-car garage into living space without having first obtained those necessary permits, thus contravening local zoning regulations. The current owner discovered to her shock that she now has to convert what she bought as a home with a guest bedroom “feature” back into a home with its originally-zoned garage.

If a refreshing change from what the rest of the world deems to be front-page “news” interests you (i.e. an Iraq-free, Stephen Harper-free front page), both stories – with photos – appear in this archived copy of the issue we read while there (just boost its size in the image percentage box that opens at the top of the page box to 125% for the best full-screen readability).

Among the local strolls we took was a walk along the town’s magnificent beach. At its northern end, you are actually below a couple of the famous Pebble Beach oceanside fairways where occasionally a rules-conscious (if less-than-accurate) golfer might be seen, sand wedge in hand, energetically trying to loft his errant shot back up the short cliff onto the fairway. (I confess that were such a daunting shot to confront me, I would like as not employ a lesser known “club” that duffers like me refer to as a “hand wedge”.)

We also doffed shoes and socks with every intention of strolling in the surf, only to discover promptly why anyone out in the water was wearing a full head-to-toe wetsuit, and one probably incorporating a battery-powered warmer to boot. It was freezing cold!

One of the signature drives you can take from Carmel, as noted in the above reference to the young Mr Indestructible, is something called the 17-Mile Drive. It’s actually a state park and entry is via a ranger-staffed gate. For most of the year, it takes you past some remarkable coastal vistas, except for (Murphy’s Law at work here) the annual seal pupping time when the good local animal-friendly folks erect a couple miles of tall green fabric barricades right beside the road, and add regularly spaced signs all along its full length cautioning drivers in no uncertain terms not to stop, or even slow down. So we would miss the seals – today. (Something we will correct, as it turns out, a couple days farther on.)

One of the signature stops along the way that was open for viewing, however, is where (without exaggeration) the world-famous Lone Cypress, a 200-year old or thereabouts tree, sits stoically on a point of rock with an unparalleled view of the Monterey coast. But on closer inspection, it becomes all too apparent that the Lone Cypress’s sturdiness is somewhat of an illusion.
The tree is maintained with some exceptionally vigorous outside help. For starters, the entire point of land on which it stands has been buttressed with breaker-resistant reinforcement. The tree itself is surrounded with a second stone wall and is now held up with multiple steel cables. Its trunk is also reinforced in places with patches of tree-coloured concrete.

(Fans of the original “Star Trek” series may recall an episode called “Devil in the Dark”, in which Ship’s Surgeon Leonard McCoy saves the life of a badly-injured silicon-based life form called a Horta by trowelling a bunch of thermal concrete into its wound. It’s not a huge leap to see similar thinking at work in the concrete “bandages” with which Carmel’s Lone Cypress has been patched.)

But they remain fiercely proud of their elderly arboreal attraction in Carmel. At the lookout that offers the best view of the tree, there is a large sign warning that it and its image are copyright protected and anyone snapping a picture with the intent of using it as a logo or illustration to promote a commercial venture without first obtaining the requisite property release will face the wrath of something called the Pebble Beach Corporation. (The Corp’s own logo, appropriately enough, is in fact not a pebble-strewn beach, but the above-noted tree – note the black-and-white circle that fades in front and centre here on the Corp’s home page.

But we couldn’t leave the realm of the Pebble Beach Corporation without making a pilgrimage to its namesake golf club – 18 holes that probably place consistently in the top two or three of anyone’s list of the world’s best-known golf courses, sharing pride of place with the Old Course at St Andrew’s, Scotland, and the Augusta National, home of the Masters. (The line-up of ornery arguing golfers forms on the left. But Pebble Beach is certainly right up there.)

In fact, if you tour 17-Mile Drive, it’s hard to avoid visiting the venerable golf club – 17-Mile Drive’s route takes you right smack between the Pebble Beach clubhouse parking lot and its front door!

Pebble Beach is officially a public course, but given that its green fees are presently $475, “plus cart” (and probably rising monthly), it’s a pretty select “public” who will make room in their budget for a playing tour of these hallowed links.

And their bar prices match their green fees. Opting for a break on the clubhouse terrace, my wife and I each had a glass of California wine, she a Chardonnay, me a Merlot (Oh, save it, Sideways fans! *) overlooking the course’s most famous green – the 18th – and were returned no change from $50 for the privilege.
But how often do you get greenside at Pebble Beach? (Repeat with every sip.) We toasted the health of my father-in-law, himself a golfer of no mean skill for nearly seven decades (and who coincidentally is in possession of a small vial of sand from one of the bunkers beside the very same green we now overlooked).

*Jack: If they want to drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot.
Miles Raymond: No, if anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!

(Source: IMDb, Memorable quotes from the hilarious mid-life crisis movie, “Sideways”, about one guy’s farewell-to-bachelorhood California wine country tour gift to his friend.)

Next morning, my biology was still firmly ensconced on Ottawa time so I awoke at the crack of dawn. But as I discovered, that just happens to be the absolute best time of day to go for a stroll on an ocean beach. Beach access was a mere three blocks from the B&B in which we were staying and, in minutes, I was rambling slowly along the shoreline, now considerably widened by the low morning tide and exposing vast new stretches of sand.

The previous day, I had already noticed that the smooth wet sand was frequently marked by little trails that each ended abruptly in a small hole. On this early morning, I discovered why and, in the process, discovered what have to be the world’s dumbest crabs. (Of course, if one starts with “crab” as a benchmark, it might not be a big leap to “world’s dumbest”, but even by crab standards we are talking off the Mensa radar.)


When we were on the beach the previous afternoon, we had seen lots of little crab carcasses, each one the residue of a creature cored by one of the dozens of crows and gulls that cruise the shore looking for just such a delicacy. But in the early morning, the little creatures themselves are in evidence, having erupted out of the sand after crafting their random little sub-surface trails. But it seems they do so solely to flop over on their backs and wait to add their little bit to the great avian buffet circle of life. At one point, I reached down and actually turned one upright. It took exactly two uncertain steps and then once more flopped over onto its back.

Nature finds a way, and nature in this case has told these crabs, “Your role in life is to be bird food. Go to it!”

California Highway #1.

I have been on the Cape Breton Highlands coast road; I have been on Montana’s Road to the Sun that crosses the Continental Divide; I have been on France’s Rue de Soleil and crossed the Alps to get there; I have driven the twists and turns of the Cotswolds. And now I can add California’s Highway #1 along the Big Sur coastline to my personal short list of truly magnificent drives.


On a map, the run from Carmel south to Cambria is about 90 miles. And most guides suggest two hours’ drive time. But give yourself a day. And if possible take the trip south from Carmel (unless you’re an acrophobe) because then, as you navigate the cliffside highway, you’ll be on the side of the road where there’s nothing between you and the Pacific surf, sometimes several hundred feet below. The other reason to give yourself a full day is because you simply cannot – unless you’re immune to spectacle – avoid stopping at every other turnout to oooh and ahhh. (So sue me, I’m a tourist.)

At one point, we were passing what the guidebook told us was a stretch of the highway in the domain of the California condor and, unless some enterprising Californian has manufactured a medium-sized aircraft decorated with feathers, we saw one
-- this one in fact -- out for an afternoon soar.

Eventually you will grudgingly pass the last overlook (Ho hum, just another awesome west coast vista). Now the land flattens out, the sharp-edged cliffs change to rolling coastal hills and the road signs announcing the number of miles to the Hearst Castle at San Simeon show the distance in single-digit numbers. Just past the gates to San Simeon, whose twin white Spanish-influenced towers are visible on a distant hilltop, you come to a nest of roadside motels. None of them are bad places, but my advice to you is simply to blow right past them and stay on the road for another half dozen or so miles until you reach Cambria, California.

Cambria is such a damned pleasant little place to visit, you get the distinct sense they would be perfectly happy if you just stopped, stayed briefly and moved on without giving them a whole lot of extra publicity. (No worry here – Baby Duck, enjoyed by tens of… people!)

If you start hunting for information about Cambria, one of the first scintillating facts you’ll encounter is that Cambria is known as a CDP – a Census Designated Place. I’m not going into the particulars here about what that means, but I will steer you to this site if you have a burning desire to know more.

Among the attractions that the town’s Chamber of Commerce chooses to highlight on its website are an annual Art and Wine Festival where visitors are given a wine glass and a passport to track their many tastings; a Western Dance Jamboree (It’s certainly hard to argue “western”, given that one edge of the town is the Pacific coast, but despite the fact that the event’s promotion invites you to “bring out your inner heehaw”, the accompanying picture may come as a bit of a disappointment to anyone thinking the stage will be flooded with Shania Twain or Faith Hill wannabees.); a “Chili cook-off and classic car show”. (How did they decide these theme blends – “Art and wine”; “chili and classic cars” ??)

I’m over-mocking here. Cambria is a delight. It’s a main street jammed end to end with eclectic little stores and restaurants and after a day-long scenic drive, at its far end (assuming you’ve approached from the direction of Carmel), one of the nicest Bed & Breakfasts we’ve ever found – the Olallieberry Inn.

- - -

Non-California digression:

I’m finally beginning to understand the apparent “addiction” of video gaming.

Recently, the “supply” side of the basic economics principle of “supply and demand” at last caught up to the “demand” side in the Ottawa area and I was finally able to fulfill a long-delayed promise from Santa last Christmas to bring a Nintendo Wii into the house. (“Wii” is pronounced “wee”, and is thus – you guessed it – the source of endless puns among its teenaged fans.)

Until you’ve actually experienced the Wii, there’s simply no way to appreciate what it has done for video-gaming. For starters, there is no physical connection (like a wire) between you and the TV screen. A tiny remote sensor sits on top of your television and what is in your hand is a controller about the size and shape of a Coffee Crisp chocolate bar that regularly broadcasts its position to the sensor.

So for example, let’s say the game is tennis. What you see onscreen is you (your player) and your opponent. And when the ball appears to be coming at you, you quite literally swing your arm in a forehand or backhand motion. That motion is read by the sensor and your onscreen character either hits or misses the ball, depending on how well you’ve timed your swing. The same principle applies to Wii golf, where the controller is now the shaft of your club. And you really do have to swing hard for drives, more softly for chip shots and in a putting motion for putts.

But for me, far and away more fun than I should be allowed to have (with the following noted frustration) is flying a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain.

The controller device in this case becomes the aircraft rudder stick and one of its buttons, positioned just about where it actually sits on the stick in the cockpit of a real P-51 Mustang, fires your machine guns.

The graphics are truly amazing. Twisting the controller one way or the other yanks my nimble little fighter into a full banking turn. There’s a button I can push at the same time that puts me in the position of one of my own wingmen, flying glued to my flight path. From that perspective, I gain a much wider view of the skies around and, therefore, more advance notice of where the enemy’s aircraft are. I release that button, and bam! I’m back in my own cockpit with (hopefully) the enemy bomber or fighter just slipping into my gunsight ring.


At the moment in the game, I’m in the skies over London. But my frustration lies with what the game requires of you before you are cleared to move to the next level. In this game, each level is called a “mission” and within each mission, you achieve a number of “checkpoints”. This will be clearer with an actual example.

My present “mission” requires me be successful at several tasks: first to beat back a wave of unprotected bombers whose target is the London Parliament Buildings (As the last bomber falls, you are told onscreen that you have reached the first “checkpoint”.); then a wave of bombers who attack with fighter cover (Last bomber falls – checkpoint 2.); then a wave of low-flying Stuka dive-bombers that skim the surface of the Thames in their drive to bomb the Tower of London (Last Stuka falls – checkpoint 3.); then my own wingmen, who come under the guns of a horde of enemy fighters (Last enemy fighter downed – checkpoint 4… or so I am told.).

However, the game assumes that as you progress, you also move ahead in your gaming skills, so it gets a little harder after each checkpoint. But I am of the pre-videogaming generation and my reflexes still sit somewhere south of the three-toed sloth. So depending on how ably (or not) I have mastered the Wii controller and my own reflexes, I can find myself – taking each of the above checkpoints in turn – shot out of the sky by a bomber’s tailgunner because I stayed too long in level flight on his tail; shot out the sky by a fighter that got behind me while I was lining up on a bomber; blown to smithereens because I slammed into a building in my over-eager pursuit of one of the incredibly low-flying Stukas; or simply succumbing to unrepaired damage that I failed to notice after taking several hits from the enemy planes without having activated the necessary in-flight “repair” sequence. (Nice touch, that. Airborne in-flight repair of battle damage is definitely not something that was available to pilots during the real Battle of Britain).

All the while, there’s a small onscreen “status” bar that lets you watch helplessly as, in their turn, the “health” of Parliament, the Tower, and your wingmen slowly depletes the longer you take to shoot down the enemy attackers. When that “health”-o-meter reaches zero, well, sorry. But you are treated to surprisingly detailed graphics showing, in turn, Parliament being consumed by fire; the Tower vanishing under multiple explosions, or your hapless wingman’s aircraft plummeting to earth, trailing a stream of black smoke. In every such case, the game coldly informs you, “Mission Failed!”.

Still with me here?

Here’s my beef.

After each “Mission Failed!”, like Warner Brothers’ Wile E Coyote after a half-mile long plummet to the canyon floor in countless Road Runner cartoons, I am offered the opportunity to be resurrected.

And so back I go to the end of the previous checkpoint. BUT, if I should decide that at this point that I’ve had quite enough and want to return bleary-eyed to Biggin Hill for a nap and a pint, the game exits not to the previous checkpoint, but to the end of the previous mission! In other words, it doesn’t matter that I’ve saved Parliament, the Tower and one of my two ruddy wingmen, shutting off the game at this point demands that I have to do it all over again the next time I re-enter the less than friendly skies over London.

Now fun’s fun, and I must admit to taking a vicarious delight in letting “Parliament” burn down, even if it’s the UK’s. But having done that about 25 times now, and having been myself shot down or blown up, and having crashed an unflyable aircraft at least that many times, I’d kinda like to move on.

And the only way to do that is see the entire mission through to its successful conclusion.

So my new theory is that videogame “addiction” is not addiction at all. It’s, “I got this far and before I quit I will be damned if I will go back yet again and blast those same unprotected bombers!!!” (Note to the British Medical Association Journal, Lancet: write that up as a proposal and if it flies, i.e. if someone throws you a half million dollar research grant, just mail my cut to…)

Ah well… offspring bought me Tiger Woods 2007 for the Wii for this year’s birthday just this week, and apparently it offers a virtual Pebble Beach of astonishing clarity.
I have the feeling this game, too, will have its own frustrations (just like real golf!) but I least I won’t have to put up with my wingman Joe, yet again, screaming at me to help him out because “I’m taking hits here!!” and the horde of Me-109’s is “on me like fleas on a houn’ dog!”

Deal with it Joe, I’m putting for a birdie on the number 17 island green at Sawgrass here!

Next time: more bits of Olallieberry, Elephant Seal Beach and the unbelievable Hearst Castle at San Simeon.

À la next time.