I’ve written many times about Pacific Grove and Carmel, California, and other venues on the Monterey Peninsula. But for decades I didn’t visit that idyllic place in my past.
My grandmother moved away from Pacific Grove in the summer of 1967. My husband and I went there once or twice when we were at Stanford Law School between 1977 and 1979. And then I didn’t visit again until 2005.
My parents honeymooned in Carmel in 1955, and 2005 was their fiftieth anniversary. My sister organized a family trip to Pacific Grove. She knew people who had a house right on Asilomar Beach, and we rented it for a week.
My parents came, of course, and my sister and her whole family. My husband and I came, but our children were grown and busy. My younger brother and his family were expecting a child just a few weeks later, so they bowed out as well.
There were eight of us in a three-bedroom house. My parents—the honorees—got the master bedroom. The other two couples got the other bedrooms, and my sister’s two grade-school-aged daughters were happy to bunk on the family room floor where the television was.
The weather was mixed that week, with some sunshine and some clouds. We walked on several beaches, including Asilomar which sported a dead walrus (to the dismay of my nieces). We took some easy hikes. We went to Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey. We drove to old haunts, including my grandparents’ home, Lover’s Point, the Seventeen Mile Drive, and Point Lobos. We ate good food, home-cooked and when dining out.
My parents had been to Carmel often during their fifty years together, but this trip rekindled their desire to spend more time there. During the trip in August 2005, they made plans to rent a house in Carmel in February 2006. Then they rented other houses in Carmel most winters from 2007 to 2011. I joined them for a week or so each year after I retired.
None of my trips to the Monterey Peninsula as an adult was as wonderful as the summer vacations I spent with my grandparents as a child. And yet, returning to familiar places as an adult brought those magical memories back to life. And so I am grateful to have the adult memories as well, bittersweet though many of them are.
What childhood haunts have you gone back to as an adult? Did you enjoy them as much as when you were a child?
