Day 2 - From LA to Carmel

Today we drove from LA to Carmel, about 350 miles. We drove along route no. 1 which was supposed to be scenic, but instead was mostly foggy.

We arrived at Hearst Castle at 12:30 pm and took the "Experience Tour", which is the tour they recommend for first time visitors. There are three additional tours if you are really into it and decide to come back again.
We enjoyed it very much. You would expect a place like that to be one big American kitchfest, but surprisingly it isn't. It's very nice (if you like to live in a cathedral that is).
Aunt Iris, who recommended the place to us, promised us a fancy dinner table, with ketchup and mustard bottles on it, that really don't belong there. Sure enough – they're there. We got pictures to prove.

By the time we left the castle it cleared a little bit and we got our scenic drive (As you can see from the photos the fog creates an atmosphere). We arrived in Carmel at about 6:00 pm, after passing it by and driving to Monterey and then having to come back
Noa: Elad will have you believe it was because I can't navigate, but the truth is the map was lousy and the good map that we had was on the laptop which was in the trunk.
Elad: She can't navigate. Excuses won't change that. We only got there after I stopped and looked at the "bad" map, which was next to Noa and not in the trunk.

Carmel is very pretty but seems a little out of place in California. It looks like it should be in New England. Also the place suffers from a split personality – It lives on tourists (and it sure does rip them off), but the inhabitants want to keep the place exclusive so there are no street lights at night and you have to be very perceptive in order to locate the street signs. We actually had to count streets in order to find our hotel (Junipero is the 10th street from the beach if you are really interested).

We had an OK dinner at an overpriced Italian restaurant with Hispanic waiters posing as Sicilians and then went to sleep.