John Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crab that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and
John Steinbeck includes "Rocinante", the camper-truck in which Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in "Travels with Charley". His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives. In Monterey, Ed Ricketts' laboratory survives (though it is not yet open to the public) and at the corner which Steinbeck describes in "Cannery Row", also the store which once belonged to Lee Chong, and the adjacent vacant lot frequented by the hobos of Cannery Row. The site of the "Hovden Sardine Cannery" next to Doc's laboratory is now occupied by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.