Sailboating in Monterey

Hi there!

It’s Sunday night and I’m sitting here watching the first football of the season. Between having the NFL package with my satellite TV where I can watch any game I want every weekend (I can finally watch every Giants game!), and being in my co-worker’s Fantasy League again, I’m pretty excited for the NFL season to begin. YAY for football!

Last night my hubby and I had a date night to celebrate his birthday. We headed to Monterey in the early evening to first grab a drink and a bite to eat on Fisherman’s Wharf.

I tried a pear cocktail that was yummy. It had pear flavored vodka, lemon juice and lemon lime soda. I’d like to recreate it at home – perhaps subbing the soda for a heathy lemonade mix or something? Hmmmm. For my appetizer, I couldn’t resist getting crispy artichoke hearts after passing the artichoke capital of the world, Castroville, on our way to Monterey. The appetizer was a big portion so I only ate only half an order.

Next up was our sailboat excursion! Unfortunately it was really overcast out so we didn’t get to see a pretty sunset at sea, but we still had a good time sailing around.

I booked a private ride with Carrera Sailing. A lot of the charters in the area are totally overpriced, and they were the most reasonable one that I found. The captain was a friendly, personable guy who talked to us a lot about his experiences racing sailboats around the world.

Adam and I have both been on boats our whole lives, but neither of us have had much experience with sailboats, so it was neat to see the captain work the boat.

Once the sun started going down, it felt pretty chilly out. I was glad that I had a cocktail to keep me a bit warm, but that wore off pretty quick!

And because I love David Gray, I kept singing this:

We had late dinner reservations at a restaurant that had live jazz music, but we wound up changing our plans. Due to low wind on the way back to the pier, we got back late. Neither of us were really hungry after having eaten appetizers to hold us over (The fact that 1/2 an appetizer kept me too full to have dinner says something about restaurant portion sizes!), and since we were late for our reservations anyways, we decided to skip it. Instead we headed to a cafe on the wharf for some hot chocolate (me) and coffee (Adam) to warm up a bit.

It was a good move!

The only minor blip to our night was getting back to the car and seeing this loveliness…

We had parked in a street spot that was 2-hour parking until 8 pm, and we arrived at seriously 2 minutes before 6. This jerky cop gave us a ticket at 7:58… Really?! What made it more aggravating was that the officer wrote in the remarks that he had chalked my car at 5:45, which was a lie since we didn’t park until 10-15 minutes after that. Annoying right? Oh well, there’s nothing I can do but pay this totally unnecessary parking ticket. Like I said, just a minor downside of the night. Overall, we had a fun date night in Monterey. Hope that you had a great weekend too!