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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| R2's replacement, a V60 |
In San Francisco we crawled down 19th
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.
