Jellyfish in Monterey, Kitesurfers up the Coast
Drove down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Cannery Row — entrance right at the corner of David Avenue — and went straight for the jellyfish galleries. Sea nettles first, orange bells with tentacles trailing far longer than the bodies, then a dark tank full of small blue ones drifting every direction at once. The moon jellies were the strange ones: you could see clean through them, the four-leaf pattern of their stomachs lit up like something etched in glass. The smallest of the girls stood at the tank with her back to us, not moving, jellies bobbing past like lamps.
The kelp forest tank is the other reason to go — two stories of it, kelp reaching all the way up, a school of silver fish threading through, and the people at the bottom of the glass looking small against it.
On the drive back up the coast we pulled over where the wind was clearly working. Kitesurfers and windsurfers scattered across the water below the bluffs, kites strung out toward a headland with a hole worn through it. The girls and their mom took the little bluff trail and waved from the top.
