Carmel-by-the-Sea

Courtyard at Little Napoli

Carmel has gradually been growing on me over the past few years. I used to go down there once a year for the car show associated with the Concours d'Elegance at Pebble Beach. One year I persuaded Frieda to accompany me and, after enjoying the rare cars, we ducked into Little Napoli on Dolores and Seventh to grab some lunch. There was a wait for a table so we set off down Dolores with a buzzer and quickly came to a winery called Caraccoli. We liked the wines there so much that we joined their club. Now we have to go down at least twice a year to pick up our semi-annual shipment of wines. Plus, whenever we're in town we can taste there for free, so that provides another incentive to visit. 

Carmel Beach

  In mid-October we were there for the day and enjoyed it so much we decided to schedule an overnight in early November to take advantage of the last of the warm, sunny fall weather and bring Dino, our white collie, along, seeing as how the town is so dog friendly. It turned out to be a beautiful day, about 70 degrees with brilliant sun. We got there around noon and Frieda was hungry so we went straight to Little Napoli, one of our favorite stops, and sat in the very pleasant patio with Dino. It was a Thursday so few people were around. We ordered PepeCello spritzes, a specialty of the house that are marvelously refreshing, and split an order of fried calamari and papardelle in bolognese sauce. We'd brought dog treats with us for Dino.

Dino

After lunch we drove down to Scenic Road, found a parking place, got out and walked along the paved path that overlooks the beach, shaded by wind swept cypress trees locked in stationary dance. The beach there is brilliantly white and the ocean is clear because no creeks or rivers dump sediment into it. Dino didn't like the sand because it was too soft for him to run in, but it was lovely to sit on. It's a beautiful beach, but the water is too cold to swim, unless you're part polar bear. Dino looks a bit like a small polar bear but he doesn't like water. 

It was after 3 by the time we got back to the car and headed to the Carmel Lodge, nothing fancy but clean and adequate at a reasonable price and in a good location, quiet but next to downtown. After getting settled there we crossed Ocean Avenue to Caraccioli. The town is small enough that you can pretty much walk everywhere, at least in the downtown area. The young women behind the counter welcomed us, and especially Dino, who one of them rolled around with on the floor. (Dino was a hit everywhere we went.) After getting slightly drunk for free (not Dino, of course), we walked back to the Lodge, sat out on the balcony, chatted, and watched the sun go down.

Carmel Lodge

When we started to get hungry we walked across the street to a restaurant called Casanova. Of course, being with Dino, we had to sit in the patio area in the front, and it was dark already and getting chilly. The sommelier turned on an electric heater above our table but it took a while to warm up and I began to get impatient, thinking I was never going to get tolerably warm. The prices on the menu were expensive and I didn't feel like paying them while I shivered in the cold in my coat. Also, the wine list was ridiculously pretentious. It was the size of a metropolitan phone book and had wines for $2500 a bottle. I mean, really? About the cheapest wine we could find was $35 a half bottle. Many of the entrees on the menu were just designated “MP” for market price, which made me suspicious. The combination of all these factors started to make me grumpy, but finally the heater began to crank and the waitress, who had at first seemed stiff, robotic, and artificial, began to loosen up. She brought me an excellent ossobuco that just fell off the bone and my mood began to improve. Frieda had a risotto with wild mushrooms that had been foraged that morning and soon we were chatting and laughing with the waitress and the sommelier and the evening began to seem enjoyable after all. In the end the bill came in at just under $200, including tip. Not cheap but not completely off the rails, either. 

Casanova

 

In the morning Frieda took Dino for a walk around downtown looking for the Court of the Fountains. She said downtown was deserted except for a few other early morning dog walkers. Shortly after her return, breakfast was delivered to our room and we ate on the balcony. The weather, again, was virtually perfect. Afterward she led me on a scenic stroll through downtown, including the Court of the Fountains, to the tourist information office to pick up some materials on Carmel Valley, on the other side of Route 1, where we intended to taste wine in the afternoon. 

Court of Fountains

 

After a farewell cruise along Scenic Road, we headed for the valley, stopping first at Boekenoogen Winery, where we bought a bottle each of Viognier and Syrah. Then we crossed the road to Café Rustica for lunch, a pleasant patio where Dino and I shared a burger and everyone, as usual, fawned over him. Finally, we all walked a short distance down the highway to the Bernardus Winery where Frieda and I sampled a few more wines without finding any we liked enough to buy. To keep our heads clear for the drive home we even poured most of them into the spit bucket. By then it was 3 in the afternoon and the traffic was starting to thicken so we got on the road for home. Tired from all the activity, Dino settled down in the rear of the V60 for a nice snooze. 

Cafe Rustica

Lighthouses

Point Cabrillo

Frieda's nephew flew into San Francisco early Friday afternoon for a weekend birthday party with a longtime friend. He lives on the east coast and we don't get to see him as much as we'd like, so we seized the opportunity to pick him up and take him to the party site in St. Helena in the Napa Valley, a hotel called Auberge du Soleil. We were driving a rental car because Frieda had wrecked our Volvo V40, (affectionately known as “R2” on account of the noises made by its radar detector), a few days before, crashing into the car she was following in stop-and-go rush hour traffic. (It was a total loss.) The nephew, who works in finance in NYC, sat in the back seat of the rented Corolla negotiating a deal on his cell phone most of the way. In the town of Napa we pulled over at a Spanish restaurant called Zuzu and ordered some tapas while he showed us videos of the antics of his infant daughter back in Manhattan. He was on his own because his wife was newly pregnant with their second, nauseous, and not in a party mood. After walking off lunch along the riverfront, we cruised on up the valley to Auberge where we shared espressos on a terrace with a bucolic view before returning to Napa to check into our hotel. After a couple hours relaxation, we motored up to Yountville for dinner at Bistro Jeanty where the smelts, mussels, and especially the pork shoulder were excellent despite the noise. (Like many San Francisco restaurants, you needed a megaphone to have a conversation.) Out in the street afterward we glanced up and spotted an eclipsed blood moon hanging like a Halloween lantern in the black sky. 

 

North Cliff

The next morning we returned to Auberge for french toast and a discussion of family politics with the nephew on the terrace. Afterward, for an additional excursion, we pointed the little Corolla across the coastal range through the Anderson Valley toward Mendocino. Around Boonville we caught a whiff of smoke from the wildfires, but it dissipated in the sea breeze as we crossed the crest on a curvy mountain road thickly lined with evergreens. Frieda had an immediate negative reaction to Mendocino: too hippiesque. But after a decent lunch and a walk past the distinctive wooden water towers along the bottom of town where the sea view dominates, shopping in a bookstore and a chocolate shop, her aversion softened. Still, there isn't much to Mendocino beyond the idyllic setting: a few hundred residents and slightly less tourists. I’ve got no problem with the culture, but it’s just too small and remote to keep me entertained for long. After a couple hours we'd covered it and headed north to Fort Bragg where we'd decided to stay because it was cheaper than Mendocino. 

Point Arena

We had reservations at a place called North Cliff, on the water. As we entered the room, I saw windows framing fishing boats chuffing into the harbor mouth for the evening. My admittedly low expectations for this hotel were greatly exceeded. To the right was a door to a balcony, while off to the left was a gas fireplace with a pair of upholstered armchairs in front of it. But then we drove downtown to see what was going on there and the answer turned out to be: nothing whatsoever. Ft. Bragg is ten times the size of Mendocino but you wouldn’t know it from the number of people on the street. I'd never seen so many empty parking spaces. Except for a couple of young vagrants hanging in front of a bar, everyone was apparently at home. Virtually no stores open. And this was at seven PM on a Saturday night! Nothing to keep us there, so we snagged a bottle of Bailey's at a liquor store and headed back toward the hotel on the highway but turned off before arriving and wound down to the waterfront. We found the restaurant the hotel had recommended on the harbor, even though my iphone had it in a parking lot a block away, but it was nothing special. Back at the hotel we put our feet up in front of the gas fire, savored the view, and sipped our Bailey's.

Point Bonita Tunnel

 

Heading south on Route 1 in the morning we turned off at Point Cabrillo Lightstation. Frieda had decided that lighthouses were to be the theme of this drive. At the far end of the parking lot a sign warned “No Vehicles Beyond This Point,” though the pavement continued. I had a sore toe so I ignored the sign and proceeded to another lot nearer the lighthouse where we parked in defiance of the authorities' apparently arbitrary dictum. Inside the lighthouse was a museum depicting the history of the structure, built to facilitate the transport of lumber from the northern redwood forests down to San Francisco during the building boom that followed the quake and ensuing fire of 1906. 

Next stop, 39 miles down narrow, twisty, scenic Route 1, was the taller, more phallic Point Arena Light. Rather than buy a ticket at the gate to climb to the top, because of Frieda's aversion to heights, we merely got a free pass to visit the gift shop where we bought a key chain for our house sitter who, we’d learned while discussing the trip, was a fan of lighthouses. From there we headed south to Jenner, pulling off at a resort called Timber Cove, where we'd spent a couple of nights many years ago. We sat at the bar and looked at a map to figure out if we had time for some lunch. The food had been exceptional when we'd stayed there before, but the bartender now informed us the place had changed owners and was no longer a wildlife sanctuary as it had been when we’d visited previously, and that the raccoons that had once frolicked freely there (and that Frieda, of course, had befriended) had, all 95 of them, been relocated. This discovery deeply annoyed Frieda who consequently decided she didn't want to eat there. 

Point Bonita Bridge

 

By the time we got down to the southern end of peaceful, lacustrine Tomales Bay we'd had it with narrow, serpentine roads. To get to Point Reyes Lighthouse would have entailed another hour and a half of it, 45 minutes out and 45 minutes back, so we decided to skip it and take Sir Francis Drake Boulevard across the peninsula to Corte Madera where our hotel awaited. 

In the morning we had reservations at Muir Woods, a famous sight we’d somehow never managed to see. It would have been serene had it not been thronged with raucous families, but the trees seemed mere youngsters compared with the ones we'd seen at Jedediah Smith State Park on our Oregon trip. After walking the loop we drove across the Marin headlands to Point Bonita. We'd first seen this lighthouse in an episode of the TV crime drama “Murder in the First,” set in San Francisco, and were struck with its precarious perch and the slender white suspension bridge that provides the only access. It's only open two days a week for a few hours and we just happened to be there on one of them. It wasn't open yet, but nevertheless the small parking lot was already full. We paused, wondering what to do, and while we were debating, someone backed out, so we pulled in. It's about a half mile hike down a trail to get to a tunnel through the mountain. After a 20-minute wait, the black door of the tunnel entrance opened, and a docent emerged. We followed him into the darkness and, ducking to avoid the low ceiling, snaked through the hand-hacked passageway, coming out on the path to the bridge, like a rope-bridge made with steel cables. The rusty blockhouse beyond didn't seem like much of a prize for such a precarious crossing, but it was interesting to experience the context of the TV scene, even though it rendered the plot conceit that framed it even more preposterous because the perp would have had no plausible reason for being in such a remote locale other than to show it off. 

R2's replacement, a V60

 

In San Francisco we crawled down 19^th Street to get on the 280 freeway, a wide, relatively straight sweep of uncluttered pavement that was a refreshing change from all the claustrophobic, twisty two-lane roads we'd been trapped on for the past couple of days. That meant we would miss the Pidgeon Point Lighthouse on Route 1 in San Mateo County, but we'd seen it before on numerous occasions.

Back home we started shopping for R2’s replacement.

James Aschbacher

James with his Art

Phillip Roth, the writer, died recently and by way of bidding him farewell I was reading some interviews I found on line.  In one of them he commented about how difficult it is to accept the deaths of friends.  With our parents it's painful of course, yet we expect our parents to die at some point.  It's the natural course of events.  But friends we think of as peers who will always be with us.  Unlike a parent, the death of a friend doesn't seem right.  It seems unnatural.  It's not supposed to happen.

Frieda and I have been having dinner with James and Lisa at each other’s houses at least once a month for fifteen years.  We've been to concerts together, plays, movies, bars, parties, restaurants.  We even took a trip to NewYork City together.  When we traveled separately, we dropped off and picked up each other at the airport, cared for each other’s' pets.  They had come to be a constant in our lives, a part of the fabric.  Lisa with her encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and movies, and James' wacky, absurd sense of humor.

 

James in NYC

The last time we had dinner together at their house was much like all the others.  James was perhaps a little irritable, annoyed, we imagined, at the prospect of a looming trip for a family gathering in Chicago, a memorial for his mother who had recently died.  He didn't like to travel.  But there was still plenty of laughter.  He went off on a rant about the “hands” and “fingers” of bananas.  We had a disagreement about the band Franz Ferdinand: I liked them better than he did.  Because of this, I may have been very slightly annoyed with him when we left.

The very next morning, before I was even awake, Frieda rushed into the bedroom: “James has had a stroke!”  And with that, the nightmare began.  Two days later I stood by his bedside at the Stanford Medical Center and watched him die, watched his hands turn blue as the circulation stopped.  I had to keep telling myself that I would never see him again because it seemed so utterly impossible that he was now so far away as to be unreachable though he was right there in front of me.  He had been snatched out of our mutual time and hurled violently into the past. 

A few weeks before this the bottom had fallen out of a planter box out on our deck.  James had noticed and offered to help me fix it.  We spent a couple hours one Saturday morning working on it together.  I held the little blocks of wood that would support the bottom while he screwed them into the plywood sides.  He laughed when the block I was holding slid sideways.

Today I was watering the potted plants around the deck and came to the same planter box.  I could visualize him standing there, hunched over the box, laughing.  How could he not be there?  

The geraniums in that planter box are hale and blooming.  They don't know they have James to thank for their snug home.  But we now realize what a cozy world we had with him in it.