Loving Sunset at Lovers Point Park
Discovering Pacific Grove with a sky to match my hair
I started my first full day in Monterey County by sleeping for a dozen hours, which mostly undid the damage of being awake for nearly a day. Doing so meant missing a trip to the Old Town Salinas Farmers Market and The Cherry Bean for coffee with Mary and Chuck, but it was necessary. Such are the trade-offs for pre-dawn flyers.
It’s not like I suffered, what with being in their beautiful home where they opened the stash of Levain cookies they brought back from Manhattan a few days before I arrived. I did alright.
I grabbed a vanilla cold brew with strawberry cold foam around the corner at Brewjee Coffee before setting out to learn the lay of the land.
Last time I was in Salinas was May 2012. Even though I rented a car, it stayed parked the entire time I was there. Being a spry, young 39 with all working parts, I walked everywhere I needed to be in Salinas.
I also got lost multiple times. This didn’t change with driving. Outside of Salinas, I was fine. In the city limits? I engaged in an ongoing battle with Apple Maps that might have had me arguing with Siri like she’s people.
But I made it to Monterey, which was wildly busy because it was a gorgeous, temperate Saturday afternoon.
I drove through Cannery Row, my only John Steinbeck-related stop of the trip. The buildings that used to house fish canning factories and bordellos have been gentrified into upscale shops and hotels. Not really my thing, but I did take a few minutes to sit in the neighboring park and look at the bay.
That was enough time to realize sunset was coming up in a little over an hour. I did a quick search of the best places to watch the sunset over Monterey Bay and landed on Lovers Point Park in neighboring Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his most renowned works. It’s also a town where two friends—a musician and an artist—have lived, and they’ve told me I’d love it.
They weren’t wrong. Not even a little bit.
As I did throughout the trip, I slipped into the full parking lot and nabbed a space as someone else was leaving. My luck on this front was uncanny, starting in Santa Cruz. Maybe the universe was paying me back for not finding parking in Alameda on Friday. Whatever, thanks to the people who left when I needed them to go.
I took a bench on the sandy side of the park that overlooked jagged rock outcrops guarded by a very serious seagull who was the size of my cat.
I soon realized the bench was pointless, because I jumped up every time I heard waves crash. And as it was in Santa Cruz, the waves crashed constantly, so I leaned over the retaining wall to see where they landed.
Just past the big rocks, a young woman in a white satin dress and green sweatshirt walked barefoot in the surf. The same surf that hit the rocks so hard that the water exploded against them before getting sucked back out to sea. A few feet away, a photographer shot pictures of her wading in the surf as it soaked her dress.
Nearby, a family with three young boys, I’d guess to be under ten, and one infant, posed for another photographer.
While the parents and baby were being photographed, the little boys ran at the surf’s edge, playing Chicken with the water that battered the rocks. With their parents looking the other way, I gritted my teeth at the fearlessness of the children.
Do they not know that the ocean can snatch them away with one sweep? That it’s so much more powerful than their tiny bodies? Their shrieks and laughs indicated that no, this wasn’t information they had. Or maybe the thrill was worth more.
Feeling the rumble of my anxiety, I returned to my bench. Sunset was beginning. Families came to the wall, and three of them posed for photos while Mom stood behind the camera.
Dear Fathers, I write this to you with all the love in my heart. You all have cameras in your pockets, just like the mothers of your children. STOP. LEAVING. HER. TO. TAKE. EVERY. FAMILY. PHOTO. Because someday she’ll be gone, and your children, hopefully well into adulthood by then, will look through family photos and realize how few include their mothers. And they will be sad, ony having memories of their mothers taking their photos instead of smiling back from an image captured in time.
I saw this over and over, everywhere I went in Monterey County. And every time I saw it, I interrupted. “Hey, Mom? Get in the picture. I got you.” They all seemed surprised, then thanked me, handed over their phones, and let me take their photos as the sky shifted to pink that reflected off the water and matched my hair.
The colors faded into the gray of early evening, and I took a drive through Pacific Grove with the idea that, if parking was available near any of the restaurants that caught my attention, I’d consider it serendipity and stop for dinner.
It didn’t happen, but I was able to get familiar with the beautiful little Victorian gingerbread houses and small-town storefronts that would lure me back during daylight hours on Sunday.
I drove back to Salinas and, on Mary’s recommendation, went searching for the La Paloma food truck. I found it—after taking a bunch of wrong turns, of course—tucked into an industrial neighborhood in front of an electrical components company that I shouldn’t have been able to find. Thirty bucks bought an al pastor burrito and carne asada fries that were both so big that Mary, Chuck, and I all had dinner with leftovers for my breakfast on Sunday. I was going to need it.
Beautiful shots—especially the seagull with sunset 🩵
Love your photos!