Playing hooky

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Originally uploaded by b3nj1

Karen and I took today Friday off! We read that the whale watching was especially good this year after a couple of lean years, so we thought we'd check it out.

We headed out on Thursday night for dinner at Casanova in Carmel. On the way, our new Garmin Nuvi 660 GPS gave us creative directions. It came with an introductory subscription to FM traffic updates. Since 101 was a bit backed-up, the GPS thought we'd benefit from taking every exit ramp and then immediately re-entering the highway. We opted to rough it traveling at the speed limit in the carpool lane. :-)

Before dinner, we had some drinks at Hog's Breath Inn in Carmel. Then we walked over to Casanova. We ate there on our honeymoon last September and loved the place! It came highly recommended by a foodie friend of mine, Roman. It was still great, but not as fabulous as last time. The spinach gnocci was so freakin' good! Karen's rack of lamb was seasoned well, but a little over-cooked. I got the seafood linguine which was a bit bland and also over-cooked. For dessert, the warm chocolate cake was very tasty.

Friday morning, we went down to Monterey's Fisherman's Wharf for a whale watching tour with Monterey Bay Whale Watch. We had checked the weather before leaving San Jose, and knew to expect cloudy and cold weather. We had four-five layers on, but six would have been nice. Burrr..

We saw three clusters of whales. The second group was a mom and calf along with two other adults. They did some synchronized dives for us!

I snapped a bunch of pictures, but had some trouble with the lighting. I used my Canon 40D with an Canon EF 70-300mm lens. I set the camera to shutter priority at 1/500s in hopes to minimize motion blur. I think I should have gone a bit faster, and also set the ISO to ~800 instead of auto to coax the meter to pick smaller apertures. I think that would have given more forgiving focus. Most shots are not sharp :( We'll just have to go back!

While on the topic of gadgets... A little while ago, I got a compact GPS logger so I could geo-tag my pictures. I got the Holux M-241. It's the size (and spitting image of) a film canister, and it is really good at locking to the satellites. (The thing locks from the middle of our house!) I just fire it up and put it in my pocket. So, all the photos have their location attached, and you can see them on a map in flickr.