The Traveling Idiots-Where The Tuck Are They Now?: Where did all the sardines go?

To maintain my impeccable literary skills I try to read at least one book a year whether I need to or not. Here it is getting to be mid-May and if I'm going to finish it by December I need to get started soon. After spending the last couple of days in Monterey, Ca. I'm thinking of going with Cannery Row this year. The setting for this John Steinbeck classic that was published in 1945 was Ocean Avenue in Monterey which was lined with sardine canning factories.  The factories in their heyday were canning hundreds of millions of pounds of sardines per year. This thriving industry put money into a few peoples pockets, paid some folks enough to survive and produced quite an odor.
Due to several reasons including mother nature and overfishing the sardine population began to decrease in the 50's and the last cannery closed in 1973. Today the area which has been renamed Cannery Row in honor of the book is a bustling little ocean side collection of hotels, restaurants, shops, museums and the Monterey Aquarium, many of which are housed in the same buildings as the original canning factories. We spent a couple of nights at a small hotel called the Spindrift which was located in the heart of cannery row.
http://www.spindriftinn.com
Over the years we've seen quite a bit of the pacific coast. While I am and always will be a Florida boy that loves the west coast of Florida I'll have to admit that the rugged coast line from California up to Washington is spectacular.
We took advantage of some of the 29 miles of the Monterey Bay Coastal Walking Trail. While we didn't get the whole thing in we did manage to cover a fair bit of it from mainly heading west from the hotel and walking as far as Asilomar Beach State Beach. We did go the other way a little bit down to the touristy but interesting Old Fisherman's Wharf and then to the "working wharf" where we had a nice lunch at our kind of place. It was named Loulou's Griddle in the Middle. It had just a few inside tables along with a few outside tables (too windy to eat outside on this day) and had been featured on Diners, Drive Ins and Dives.
https://www.seemonterey.com/things-to-do/parks/coastal-trail
http://www.loulousgriddle.com
The whole area had a nice California laid back feel which along with the scenery made for a couple of nice days with nothing much on the agenda other than wandering around. There is a quote that we like to live by "All who wander are not lost". We did quite a bit of wandering during our time there and it may have looked it to an outsider but we were never lost.
As we headed out of Monterey and on to San Francisco we did have a few things we wanted to do along the way. First up was the Seventeen Mile Drive which passes through the Del Monte Forest and by the Pebble Beach Golf Course. The drive which costs just over $10 to do is well worth it as it takes you further along the coast past some amazing coastal overlooks and several really nice golf courses including Pebble Beach where a round of golf will set you back $525! And if you like the golf course so much you want to live in the area we did look up the price of one home and it was going for just under 15 million. We were tempted but decided not to make an offer.
After lunch at the Gallery Café overlooking the first tee where every ten minutes groups of four were teeing off (in case you were wondering if people really paid that much to play the course) it was on to Carmel by the Sea. This cool little town had the baddest one term Mayor back in 1986-1988, Clint Eastwood. It also is proud of the fact that it has no chain restaurants and while the streets have names they do not have house numbers.  Mail is delivered to a central post office. The reason, somewhere way back they decided that addresses were too "citified".
https://www.carmelcalifornia.com/fun-facts-about-carmel.htm
Our last destination was Big Sur village which was about 30 miles down the coast on Highway 1.  This area had a lot of rain earlier in the year and unfortunately mudslides took out a major portion of the road past the village so we had to take the road both directions, however the drive hugged the coast line the whole way. Mountains on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other......not a bad drive at all on a cool, crisp and sunny California day!