Artists and writers established it in 1904 as a bucolic retreat in a pine-forested bay shore hillside. All of those are there now, but McDonalds, Sears, Safeway and others are not. I spotted early this month were The Nature Company and Sharper Image.
Smallness is the order of the day.
We never stumbled over any artists or writers on the streets, but it is no trick at all to find the Hog's Breath restaurant at the bottom of a dell entered via the low-rise, redwood Eastwood Building. Hog's Breath features a mammoth mural on a rock face of a Swiss alpine scene. The food is better, locals say, since a new operator was brought in. Eastwood was in the news while we were there as a jury weighed whether his Mission Ranch resort, also in Carmel, had in 1996 failed to provide a disabled woman with adequate access ramps. The verdict came in just a few hours, based on a showing she hadn't actually tried to use the facilities in 1996.