Sightseeing after StanCon?

Is there someone familiar with California who would like to help with or join sightseeing the weekend after StanCon (13-14 January)? (I’ve never been in California before).

Hi Aki, I’ll have an extra day on the 13th. I’d be interested in joining for some sightseeing.

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The traditional sightseeing would be to drive up and down 101 right around where you’re at—that’s the California coastal highway. There are little “artsy” towns around like Carmel and Monterey and further down, Big Sur. Going north, you hit the hippie university enclave of Santa Cruz, which has an amusement park with an old rollercoaster and boardwalk and a really cool campus distributed through a redwood forest (not to mention banana slugs).

Of course, San Francisco’s only 2.5 hours or so to the north, with Berkeley across the Bay and Silicon Valley to the south (not much sightseeing there, though Stanford’s campus is awfully nice). Then Mendocino is just north with some redwood forests and Napa/Sonoma just a bit further north.

Four hours to the East through the Central Valley you hit Yosemite National Park. Not sure if it’s open in the winter.

This might help for things around Asilomar:

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the Monterey aquarium is a good one.

highway 1 is the coastal highway! however, it is closed in Big Sur (to the south of Monterey) - https://weather.com/news/news/2017-11-14-big-sur-california-landslide-recovery

Oh, right—that’s an awesome aquarium—best I’ve ever seen.

I thought 101 sounded wrong :-)