Departures: Monterey 2018

May 3-4 2018, I took an overnight trip to Monterey. There, I took a walk along the scenic coast and visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Walking the coast, I stopped twice gobsmacked by things I'd seen before virtually. A restaurant called Fishhopper—I'd seen it before on a feed of unsecured unintentionally-public IoT webcams. (Well, maybe not so much "unintentionally-public" as "public by unintended side effect": while researching just now, I find that the restaurant has a web page showing the webcam view on purpose.) I saw the Borg Motel, which I'd previously only seen on Google Streetview, idly speculating about whether the StreetView drivers had covered its parking lot so thoroughly by coincidence or for other reasons.

And there were rocks, seals, boats, plants, water; the things one looks for in a northern-California coast walk.

Nowadays, there's a historical lighthouse to walk to. There are exhibits where you can read about old shipwrecks. Also there are excerpts from the instruction manual for lighthouse-keepers. Back then, you were expected to receive visitors, but would have to dissuade them from scratching their initials into the lighthouse's light-focusing lens. You think modern-day vandals are bad, but apparently they used to cause shipwrecks (assuming there's a reason behind that entry in the instruction manual…).

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I looked at aquatic animals.

This time, instead of taking the Amtrak "train" (which I remembered last time turned out to be more a series of train-bus transfers), I took an SFO-Monterey airport shuttle. It cost a few dollars more, but was quicker.

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