Travel Diary: Monterey Bay

Hey guys, 

Today's post is the third in my series of posts about my travels to California (you can read my San Fran post  here and my Yosemite post). The next stop on our trip down the west coast was Monterey Bay! Here, we went whale watching and visited the world famous aquarium! Hope you enjoy reading!

It's fair to say that I do not look my most glamorous in these photos, as I am incredibly windswept and have minimal make up on, but I was having fun, so who cares!

On a side note, that woman is giving me the dirtiest look ever...

But here I am, shivering with my gloves on waiting to see some whales and we were lucky enough to see some humpback whales! You can see footage of this on my vlog on my YouTube channel, which I will link  here; it was pretty damn cool.

I'm proper buzzing on this like, but I think I'm just happy to have a hot drink after the freezing cold boat trip. 

I joke, I joke, it was actually cause we were in Ghirardelli's, and in the time that we spent in California, we ended up loving it here. The original factory was actually in San Francisco, and our hotel was next to it, so we ended up going in and trying some of the chocolate. Gonna be honest, it was bloomin' great. Plus, they give you a free little sample when you walk in. We walked in a lot.

Don't worry, we ended up buying a lot, so they definitely made their money back! 

Next place we visited was the aquarium, and it was probably one of the best aquariums that I have ever visited. Plus, it was good to know that all the birds and sea life were released back into the wild after they had been looked after, as they had been taken in injured or found abandoned when young.

Bloody love penguins

The otters were honestly adorable!

Can you tell that I like sea lions?

So as you can probably tell by the mass of pictures, I loved the aquarium!

For dinner, we stopped off at a restaurant on the pier, and had the most stunning view of the sunset!

Okay, I have kind of cheated on this next part, as these next photos were not actually taken in Monterey Bay. They were actually taken in Carmel, which is about a 20 mile drive from Monterey.

We decided to visit here as we had heard good things from many people (and my dad also wanted to visit as Clint Eastwood lives here. Unfortunately, we did not see or meet him, but the town of Carmel was well worth a visit!)

As you can see, the houses aren't stereotypical of an American village, and the buildings here were influenced by European architecture. I thought this was pretty cool, and it was actually really pretty!

Here, we did a bit of retail therapy and stopped off for breakfast and lunch. It was actually a really cute day.

So there you go, that was my trip to Monterey and Carmel! I hope that you have enjoyed this little travel post, and my next one (which will be all about Santa Monica and LA!!!) will be up soon, so keep a look out for that!

Thank you for reading!

Much love,

Grace x