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By Leplace - interactive self-guided app tours
Free cancellation available
Price is £8 per adult

Features

  • Free cancellation available
  • 2h
  • Mobile voucher
  • Instant confirmation

Overview

  • Walk through the real Monterey behind John Steinbeck's novels. From Cannery Row and Ed Ricketts's lab to Fisherman's Wharf and the bay's wild shoreline, this self-guided tour blends literary history, sardine-boom drama, marine science, and colourful local characters in the landscapes that shaped Steinbeck's most memorable stories. Solve puzzles, explore the city, and find hidden gems at your own pace. Try a new type of experience with your smartphone, the perfect mix between a walking tour, sightseeing, and a scavenger hunt.

Activity location

  • Old Fisherman's Wharf
    • 1 Old Fisherman’s Wharf
    • 93940, Monterey, California, United States

Meeting/Redemption Point

  • Old Fisherman's Wharf
    • 1 Old Fisherman’s Wharf
    • 93940, Monterey, California, United States

Check availability

Steinbeck Monterey GPS App Walking Tour Mobile Game in English

  • Activity duration is 2 hours2h
    2h
  • Opening hours: Mon 08:00-20:00
  • English
Language options: English
Price details
£8.34 x 2 Adults£16.68
Total
Price is £16.68

What's included, what's not

  • Inclusions
    Full flexibility: start at any hour, take a break at any time and resume later
  • Inclusions
    Next-gen mobile app guides you through each step of your adventure
  • Inclusions
    Explore the surroundings with a truly unique, immersive, GPS-enabled experience
  • Inclusions
    Interactive self-guided tour lets you move at your own pace
  • Exclusions
    A physical tour guide (not included)

Know before you book

    • Public transport options are available nearby
    • Suitable for all physical fitness levels
    • Requires installing a mobile app (instructions in confirmation email)
    • Not recommended for visually impaired people
    • Not recommended for people with impaired mobility
    • Not recommended for seniors over 80
    • In accordance with EU regulations about consumer rights, activities services are not subject to the right of withdrawal. Supplier cancellation policy will apply.
    • This activity is provided by a professional trader (a party acting within their trade, business or profession).

Activity itinerary

Old Fisherman's Wharf

  • 10m
Explore Old Fisherman's Wharf, where Monterey's harbour history stretches from the Spanish colonial era to the 20th-century sardine boom. Learn how fishing, labour, and trade shaped the waterfront, then capture a photo that still reflects the bay's working past.

San Carlos Beach

  • 20m
Explore San Carlos Beach through the historical and ecological lens that shaped John Steinbeck's Monterey. Learn how the shoreline, Ed Ricketts's marine science, and the working waterfront of the 1930s and 1940s informed Steinbeck's realism, then complete a close-looking photo challenge focused on natural detail.

Cannery Row

  • 10m
Explore Monterey's Cannery Row through its real history: the sardine boom, the collapse of the canning industry, and the streetscape that inspired John Steinbeck's 1945 novel. Find surviving industrial features, historic buildings, and markers that reveal the working waterfront behind today's famous promenade.

Steinbeck Plaza

  • 20m
Start at Steinbeck Plaza, where Monterey honours John Steinbeck and the working port city that shaped his writing. Explore the plaza, learn key dates from Steinbeck's life and books, and connect local history to Cannery Row, labour, migration, and the rise and fall of the sardine era.

Pacific Biological Laboratories

  • 10m
Visit Pacific Biological Laboratories, the former workplace of marine biologist Ed Ricketts and a key site in Monterey's scientific and literary history. Learn how this modest Cannery Row lab, established in 1928, influenced marine ecology, Steinbeck's writing, and the 1940 Sea of Cortez expedition.

Monterey Bay Aquarium

  • 20m
Explore the Monterey Bay Aquarium exterior, built inside the 1916 Hovden Cannery. Trace Monterey's timeline from the sardine boom and Steinbeck's Cannery Row to the aquarium's 1984 opening and the rise of modern marine conservation.

Hopkins Marine Station

  • 10m
Visit Hopkins Marine Station, founded in 1892, one of the oldest marine laboratories on the Pacific coast. This stop highlights Monterey Bay's scientific history and its connection to the same coastal world that shaped Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck.

Lovers Point Park

  • 20m
Explore Lovers Point Park, where Monterey Bay's dramatic shoreline connects the worlds of John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts. This checkpoint combines a short run challenge with the ecological history of Pacific Grove, highlighting key facts from the 1930s and 1940s that shaped modern marine observation and Steinbeck's way of seeing the coast.

Location

Activity location

  • LOB_ACTIVITIESLOB_ACTIVITIES
    Old Fisherman's Wharf
    • 1 Old Fisherman’s Wharf
    • 93940, Monterey, California, United States

Meeting/Redemption Point

  • PEOPLEPEOPLE
    Old Fisherman's Wharf
    • 1 Old Fisherman’s Wharf
    • 93940, Monterey, California, United States

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