24th Apr, 2010
A bright, sunny Saturday morning of April in bay area, what can be a better idea than hitting the black tar of 101! Me and my dear friend Laal, we started cruising in southern direction. After a peaceful, relaxing drive of around 75 miles drive on US-101 & CA-1, we finally took a right turn on Ocean avenue to reach Carmel-by-the-sea. Carmel is famous as an artistic place in California and has an enriched history of aesthetic creativity. As soon as we got out of the car we were greeted by a splendid piece of sculpture roadside – an aged retired couple enjoying their time together sitting on a bench!
As we kept strolling towards the sea beach, the picturesque city of Carmel continuously kept justifying its relevance as an ideal city for retirement. The shops on both the sides of the roads are temple of arts of its own. We could find lots of amazing sculptures, paintings, handicrafts in those shops while passing by. And of course another catchy finding was the abundance of pet dogs, as Carmel is known to be an exceptionally dog-friendly city. The white-sand beach, sand dunes were usual as on any beach on Pacific with the super chilling wind.
The city looked to be well equipped with bunch of options for accommodation. Almost each individual houses are adorable for their fairytale architecture. The patches of flowers we came across roadside were pretty colorful. Now it was time for food and we landed up in a Moroccan restaurant named CarmelTagine. The Moroccan spice marinated Kabob or tangy vegetable couscous pasta were satiating. To conclude the lunch the walnut Baklava is a must. On top of that the restaurant owner treated us with a newly introduced delicious pistachio baklava. Post lunch, we started driving further south again on CA-1. This is amazingly scenic, as the ocean comes on one side of the road and grass overed green hillocks on the other. This drive is very much soothing for eyes. We drove till the civil engineering wonder, Bixby bridge. In between, we had to stop couple of times to keep the inner shutterbug happy. Finally, we called it a day and reversed the drive direction to finish the coding left :)!
