2 Best Sights in The Monterey Bay Area, California

Primordial nature resides in quiet harmony with palatial, mostly Spanish Mission–style estates along 17-Mile Drive, which winds through an 8,400-acre microcosm of the Pebble Beach coastal landscape. Dotting the drive are rare Monterey cypresses, trees so gnarled and twisted that Robert Louis Stevenson described them as "ghosts fleeing before the wind." The most famous of these is the Lone Cypress.

Other highlights include Bird Rock and Seal Rock, home to harbor seals, sea lions, cormorants, and pelicans and other sea creatures and birds, and the Crocker Marble Palace, inspired by a Byzantine castle and easily identifiable by its dozens of marble arches.  If you spend $35 or more on dining in Pebble Beach and show a receipt upon exiting, you'll receive a refund off the drive's $11.75 per-car fee.

The most-photographed tree along 17-Mile Drive is the weather-sculpted Lone Cypress, which grows out of a precipitous outcropping above the waves about 1½ miles up the road from Pebble Beach Golf Links. You can't walk out to the tree, but you can stop for a view of it at a small parking area off the road.