California's spectacular coastline is featured on this tour down California's Highway 1. Your destination is the beautiful Monterey Peninsula. Visit Steinbeck's Cannery Row where there is time for lunch, shopping, picture-taking or for a visit to the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium. See gorgeous vistas and wildlife while traveling the coast along the 17-Mile Drive™ past the famous Pebble Beach Golf Course, stopping along the way for photos. Next, enjoy a visit to the lovely coastal town of Carmel by the Sea before returning via the famed Silicon Valley.

© Monterey County
Convention and Visitors Bureau

© Monterey Bay Aquarium

Monterey - The first capital of California after it was claimed by the United States. Visitors enjoy strolling the streets, absorbing the historical and cultural past. Monterey features an array of fine restaurants, boutiques, galleries, inns and recreational opportunities. It is host to a wide variety of festivals and world class events including The Monterey Jazz Festival, The Monterey Blues Festival, Cherries Jubilee, The Great Monterey Squid Festival and Monterey Wine Festival, as well as major automobile and motorcycle races at nearby Laguna Seca Raceway.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium - located on the site of a former sardine cannery on Cannery Row in Monterey, California, is one of the largest aquariums in the world. It has an annual attendance of 1.8 million and holds 35,000 plants and animals representing 623 species. Among the aquarium's numerous exhibits, two are of particular note. The centerpiece of the Ocean's Edge wing is a 33-foot (10-m) high tank for viewing California coastal marine life. In this tank, the aquarium was the first in the world to grow live California Giant Kelp using a wave machine at the top of the tank (water movement is a necessary precondition for keeping Giant Kelp, which absorbs nutrients from surrounding water and requires turbidity), allowing sunlight in through the open tank top, and pumping in raw seawater.

From Wikipedia

The second exhibit of note is a one million gallon tank in the Outer Bay Wing which features one of the world's largest single-paned windows (crafted by a Japanese company, the window is actually four panes seamlessly glued together through a proprietary process). Sealife on exhibit includes stingrays, jellyfish, sea otters, and numerous other native marine species, which can be viewed above and below the waterline. For displaying jellyfish, the MBA uses an aquarium called a Kreisel tank which creates a circular flow to support and suspend the jellies. Visitors are able to inspect the creatures of the kelp forest at several levels in the building.

Cannery Row  Monterey, California - the most popular vacation destination on California's Central Coast, offering visitors attractions, recreation, restaurants, affordable waterfront hotels as well as the Mobil Four-Star Awarded Monterey Plaza Hotel & Spa, convenient shopping and exciting nightlife.

Pacific Grove Chamber of  Commerce - Pacific Grove is known for its Victorian homes, Asilomar State Beach, its artistic legacy and the annual migration of the Monarch butterflies. The city is endowed with more Victorian houses per capita than anywhere else in America; some of them have been turned into bed and breakfast inns. The city is also known as the location of the Point Pinos Lighthouse, the oldest continuously-operating lighthouse on the West Coast, Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, located in the historic downtown, and the Stowitts Museum & Library. Learn more about Pacific Grove.

Pebble Beach Company - founded by Samuel Finley Brown Morse. In the early 1900s, Morse was a manager for the Pacific Improvement Company; the company had extensive real estate holdings on the Monterey Peninsula. In 1919, Morse formed the Del Monte Properties Company and acquired those holdings, which included Del Monte Forest and the popular Hotel Del Monte (now the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey). February 22, 1919, saw the grand opening of Pebble Beach Golf Links and The Lodge at Pebble Beach , which had replaced a log-cabin lodge originally located on 17-Mile Drive. Morse died on May 10, 1969, ten years after ensuring that easements would preserve hundreds of acres of forest and coastline along the 17-Mile Drive for generations to come, and 50 years after establishing a veritable monument to the power of nature and beauty. Pebble Beach Company includes three Resorts, four golf courses and more than 1,600 employees.

Monterey Museum of Art

Carmel Mission - The San Carlos Borroméo del Rio Carmelo Mission was founded at its present site in 1771 by Father Junipero Serra and was once the headquarters for the entire California mission system. Now has an active parish, school, museum and a store.

Carmel by the Sea official tourism site