A reality check.

I have a passionate aversion to vacations, regarding them as a time when you look into the distance and do nothing useful. So when chance found me on the Monterey peninsula at the start of the week I wasn’t about to let the opportunity go to waste by sitting idly on the beach.

Instead, I did something I last tried some ten years earlier, plonking down $9.25 at the gate to take the 17 Mile Drive around Pebble Beach, of golf and classic car show fame. It’s seventeen miles of the most beautiful views and coastline on earth, true, but I couldn’t but help thinking about the insane economics of living there. The nuttiness of the whole thing is perhaps best exemplified by what is possibly the most photographed object in the world, the Lone Cypress on 17 Mile Drive, near the Carmel Gate.

Obligatory snap of The Lone Cypress.
5D, 200mm, ISO 250

Now you should know that the 17 Mile Drive is home to some of the priciest real estate on earth, never more so than for the three or four estates which actually have a view of the tree. I would guess that the cost of these is $20mm each, one even going so far as to post a plaque grandly stating ‘Lone Cypress View’ at its gate. Now with opportunity cost at a modest 5% and property taxes and maintenance added, annual cost of this little abode is in the region of $1.5mm after tax, what with all the gardeners and servants required. Or $3mm pre-tax.

It gets worse. You see, 17 Mile Drive is socked in with heavy fog for three months in the summer, being on a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific, and for three more months in the winter it’s raining and awful. But catch it on a spring day or, as I did, a late autumn one and, truly, it is heaven on earth. That’s if you can get around the tour buses and crowds. So for your $3mm, you get to enjoy the Lone Cypress for 6 months of the year. Which, without a doubt, makes it the Costliest Tree in the World.

Some other views along the Drive:

Bird Rock, replete with seals, sea lions, pelicans and cormorants.
5D, 200mm, ISO 250

Spyglass golf course, with deer.
5D, 400mm, monopod, ISO 250