PPOur second and third days of the girls trip to pacific grove included a day in Carmel, shopping and going to the beach. Had to get Kim a sweatshirt because she didn't believe us that it would be cold. Funny thing, we told her it would be cold, we forgot to mention that we might never see the sun. But then again, we can see plenty of hot sun at home.
I started the morning with a wonderful walk along the beach 
which included seeing whales, though someone had to point them out to me. We had a lot of fun shopping in Carmel, 
and had lunch at Flaherty's. Then to the beach in Carmel! We got lucky because there were a lot of dolphins playing in the water and jumping around, splashing, and entertaining the tourists as well as the locals. 
The only decent picture is of a tail even though we saw lots of whole dolphins jumping out of the water. 
For dinner we went to Passion Fish in Pacific Grove for dinner. Good stuff, and we closed the place down. We didn't take a walk after dinner, fearing that we might end up with a marathon like the night before, but we forgot to go out to the fire pit. Damn!
Thursday Kim and I got up at 7
and took a nice walk along the beach. (Gotta do something about that purse, looks like I'm wearing a codpiece). We met the guy who showed me the whales yesterday, but we couldn't see any today. We did discover that they are trying to get rid of ice plant, because it's a non-native invasive plant along the seashore, which kind of spoiled our pleasure in taking cuttings of it.
After our delicious breakfast -- poached eggs, toast, hash browns, fruit plate, orange juice and coffee, we had to check out of our wonderful hotel. We went into Pacific Grove to the lovers rock or lovers leap or something, where we wandered and harassed fishermen -- who were fishing for rockfish.
From there we moved on to a little wildlife area in the city where harbor seals come ashore. 
It was so much fun to watch them because every time the water came up they would raise their tails and heads. 
We then stopped at a place that looked promising, kind of a local flavored shopping mall, but discovered it wasn't really much more than an outlet mall, and most of the businesses had moved out.
Lunch was at Sea Harvest which I swear had fish that almost swam up to our table, it was so fresh.
We started on home, but took another detour so we could go to one last beach, a long, big wave sandy beach. We left at about 6 pm, after our usual "discussion" of the best route. We took the shortest, though perhaps not necessarily the quickest, route. Had a few nice stops on the way, most notably at Casa de Fruta where we had candy, gelato, chips, popcorn, and, oh yes, fruit.
