Customer Reviews

The Best-ever Guide to the Monterey Peninsula and Carmel Area (4th Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We want to recommend this book as a no-nonsense guide to Monterey. It directed our last trip and enhanced our visit more than any other guide book ever has. We felt we saw it all this time. And we found ourselves generally agreeing with the restaurant reviews. We intend to check more of them on our next trip.

This is an honest book by an author who obviously likes to eat good food and likes the Monterey area. It is an insider's look at what the locals are doing and where they are eating. The style is chatty and informative and is free of the chamber of commerce attitude that everything-is-great and every restaurant is fine. There is reliable information in this book from an old hand in Monterey. It is a good book for a visitor to the Monterey Peninsula or for a local resident.

I thought the book was a mixed bag. The restaurant reviews were great and very helpful. We followed a couple of his recommendations and were very pleased with our meals. There are also some good descriptions of some of the activities to do in the area, but I thought he could have gone into more depth here.

The biggest gap in the book was accomodations. For a COMPLETE guide to the area, I would like to know where I should stay while I am in the area. With the author being a resident of the area, I guess he has not had a need to stay at any of the hotels/inns/etc. Before this book can be considered a complete guide, this info needs to be included.

Lastly, the second half of the book has very little helpful info about the area, but is just a reprint of articles that he had written when he first moved into the area. Fun reading, but the second half of the book is not very informative.