How to get lost in Carmel

My wife and I are now experts on how to get lost in Carmel. I don't mean "lost" in the romantic way that tourism boards and advertisers use. We didn't fall in love with the place and forget where we were. We had maps. We had Google. We had TomTom. We asked people for directions. They all failed us at least once last weekend.

We were in Carmel for Carter and Tary's wedding. Their wedding was originally going to be in the middle Big Sur, but that was on fire. All the resorts in Big Sur had to evacuate earlier in the week due to approaching wildfires that were started by a freak lightning storm. Fortunately, a new venue in Carmel was quickly booked and wedding went off without a hitch (except for the bride and groom who were, in fact, hitched).

Merri Su and I booked a beautiful room in the Pine Inn. Now all we had to do was find it. I used Google to find the address of the hotel and when we got to our rental car I punched the address into our TomTom and followed it all the way to a hotel. While it looked like a beautiful, quaint hotel, it was not the Pine Inn. I was very confused.

We decided to go in and figure out if maybe the name of the inn was changed recently or something. "Is this the... Pine Inn?"

"Umm... No, sir. This is..." I could immediately tell that the woman behind the desk was almost as confused as I was.

"OK, I can read. I realize the sign said something else. I'm just very confused because this is where our nav system brought us." I immediately thought of all those stories I read about trucks getting stuck in back roads because the driver blindly followed his or her nav system down a road that isn't even wide enough for a motorcycle. I always thought those drivers were such morons. I was now one of those morons. In the end, we found out that the address Google gives for the Pine Inn is wrong, so it wasn't entirely my fault, just mostly.

We got directions to the Pine Inn and a map from the helpful woman at what turned out to be the wrong hotel. Merri Su tried navigating us there using the map but when she told me to turn into the ocean, I knew something was not right. She then studied the map. "Oh what the hell! The top of this map points East, not North. Who does that?" Apparently the tourism board of Carmel does that. (Oh, and I do that all the time too by accident. Don't ever ask me to draw you a map unless you're looking for a brain teaser.)

Once we found the hotel it was time for a new adventure. Unfortunately, we were not feeling adventurous. We decided to get ourselves lost trying to find the rehearsal dinner that we were already late for. We knew approximately where the hotel was, but not what exit to take. We tried to find it ourselves but failed. It was time to give TomTom another try. We found the hotel in TomTom's list of nearby points of interest so we thought we were home free. TomTom brought is right to the hotel. Well, not really. It brought us to the point on the freeway right outside the hotel. For the rest of the weekend, TomTom was dead to Merri Su.

A few phone calls later we figured out the correct exit and found the hotel. Now, if only we knew where the dinner was at the hotel. I can now tell you that my wife and I know where every banquet area is in the Hyatt Regency Monterey. Everyone that worked at the hotel kept pointing us in different directions. It took a guest at the hotel who recognized our frustration to help us. It so hapenned that he noticed a rehearsal dinner earlier and pointed us to the right place.

I swear that the rest of our vacation was wonderful and we both had an absolute blast. We stopped using maps. We stopped using TomTom (after all, he was now dead to Merri Su). We stopped asking strangers for directions. The only trusted source for directions the rest of the weekend was our friends. I'll try to post about the fun parts of our trip soon. Here's a teaser: