Carmel. The name conjures up a particular image. It is, quite simply, a tourist town on the coast of central California. It is that, and much more. Carmel: playground for the rich and the rich-retired. A quaint little town, once a village, now grown, yet still having many attributes of a village with no sidewalks, trees growing in the middle of a street, no street addresses or street lights. There are still many board-and-bat cottages built back in the days when it was truly a village and an artist's colony.

Carmel happens to be set down on a peninsula, at the mouth of a fertile valley, at a piece of coastline that is unique in the world and breathtakingly dramatic. A melding of sky, sea, mountains, and river-mouth delta land. Carmel is like a jewel nestled in a belly-dancer's navel. The Carmel River empties into the sea, and the deep royal blue of the Pacific crashes wedding-cake white waves on hoary rocks that stand off shore like prehistoric reminders of another time. The St. Lucia mountain range seems to rush – to plunge down into the Pacific as the dramatic end to the land, to America. Carmel is part of the peninsula that juts out into the Pacific and holds two other towns, or communities: Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach.

Pacific Grove is a quiet area of families and retired couples of modest means. It is a religious town and it is one of the few islands of abstinence, a dry town and proud of the fact. Consequently, Pacific Grovians have to drive outside of the city limits to package stores and is literally ringed with liquor stores. At night, the people drink at home, quietly, behind drawn shades.

Most of the people who live in Carmel and Pebble Beach regard Pacific Grove as a quiet place and seldom go there.

At the entrance to the peninsula sits Monterey with its harbor and fishing fleets and Cannery Row of John Steinbeck fame. Cannery Row is nothing more than a tourist place now with only one cannery operating and the rest of the canneries and warehouses housing craft shops and clothing stores.