After arriving in Monterey on Saturday evening, we drove around looking for a hotel to stay in. I had made a rule before we left that we wouldn't stay at any Best Westerns or Days Inns and preferably, we'd stay somewhere a bit nicer. We set our limit to $170 a night and started looking around at the local hotels. We stopped at a few places on the water (Monterey is a bay area) and everywhere was booked. We found one spot but it was about $240 a night which was a bit more than we wanted to pay so we kept driving. We drove away from the water a bit and found a Marriott which looked nice, but after checking their vacancy, we were turned down once again, but were recommended to check a little place around the block called the Merritt Inn. William went inside to see if they had any rooms and they happened to have one room left and it would be $165 a night. William asked if we could take a look at it before we booked it just to make sure his 8 month pregnant wife would be comfortable. The man agreed and oddly enough mentioned that he hoped I liked the decor. Uh random statement but turned out to be highly ironic. We went up to the room and went inside to take a look. Um the stinking curtains were the same pattern as the comforter in our own bedroom! I think I liked the decor! We thought it was so funny that he would make that comment and then it be decorated like a room in our own home would be! Needless to say, we took the room and were glad to have found a nice place to stay. SO after being Mary and Josephed all around town with no rooms in the inns (aka hotels), we found a lovely stable (aka great bed and breakfast) to spend the night in! Also, because our bathroom sink wouldn't drain, they ended up giving us the room for $99 for the night! I'll brush my teeth in the shower to save $70!
Here are some pics of our room:
The curtains that match our bedroom at home
We went to dinner after checking in and unloading the car. We found a place on the fisherman's wharf where we both enjoyed some salmon and watched some seals playing in the water outside the window. We went back to our room and enjoyed our fire in our fireplace thanks to the duraflame log that they gave us at the front desk when checking in. It was really cold that night, so the fire was quite pleasant (even though we had to keep the glass doors shut on the fireplace).
The lovely Duraflame log we were given
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We got up the next morning and headed to San Francisco after grabbing a bite to eat on the way out of town. We made it to San Fran around 3:30 that afternoon and sat in traffic for a while trying to make it to the Fisherman's Wharf where we had planned on taking a boat tour around the bay. On our way to the wharf we thought we'd call and get directions to the place we were actually going and in the process found out that we had missed the last tour for the day so we decided to make our way to our hotel instead. We had actually booked a room online before leaving Monterey so that we wouldn't have to wander around San Fran to find a place to stay. We stayed at the Hotel Carlton which was nice and comfortable.
Me with all of our stuff outside the hotel
On our way to the hotel, we got to experience the hills of San Francisco. We felt like we were on a scary roller coaster driving around in our little manual car. Going up we felt like we had to lean forward so that Sally Sentra would make it to the top of the hill and on the way down we felt like we were going straight down and that the car would just fall off the street at any moment. At the top of the hill you really felt like your front two tires left the ground before tipping over and going down...like the Grinch's sleigh on top of the mountain...it was definitely a funny and scary experience. We were out of breath when we got to the hotel just from freaking out from driving! San Francisco is not the place to drive a manual!
The picture doesn't really do it justice, but this is a view going down a hill in the car
Anyway, after checking into our hotel we walked down the street and stopped at a place called Fly for dinner. We both got pizza which was yummy. Then we took a bus (we were really ignorant when it came to navigating and using public transportation, but we managed) to Ghirardelli's Square where we stopped at Ghirardelli's Ice Cream shop and got sundaes! We had been to one of these in San Diego and when I remembered that there was one in San Francisco, there was no way we were going to miss out on it! We walked around the square for a little bit after eating our ice cream and then took the bus back to the hotel where we just watched a movie and went to bed fairly early.
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The final day of our trip...to be coninued......
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