7 posts tagged “ca 07”

I found a lot of things to like about the Benbow.  No TVs in the rooms, and a strong wifi signal even on the top floor for starters.  The book of Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets on the windowside table was perhaps trying just a little too hard, though.

I presume this is de rigeur throughout the inn.  A nice touch, and it impressed even a teetotaler like me.

Standard queen-size, roomier than it looks.  From my notebook: "Pillows so comfy I almost kept one.  Equally comfy robes hanging in closet, each with a tag asking me not to."

I've been looking for a place like the Benbow all my life, it seems.  The crowd was an older one though, people who'd be impressed that someone like Basil Rathbone once stayed there (me, I'm impressed that anyone still knows who he was) and don't mind paying the ultra-high prices in the dining room.

Complete with real working fireplace.  A perfect place to sit on a rainy evening and play board games or read Tolstoy or just go to sleep on one of the big chairs.  Very previous-century, except I'm sure these days there's also usually some idiot like me sitting in the middle of everything with his laptop.

The Russian River winds about its foot and makes a great place for a dip on hotter days.

More fall colors, more mist trying to hide them.

I'd forgotten that grape leaves turn with the seasons too.

One perfect yellow carpet.  Inland the sun made a stronger effort to shine through and almost succeeded a few times.

In downtown Sebastopol the local chapter of Women In Black stood on all four corners of the 12/116 intersection for the lunch hour, protesting the Iraq war.  Back to civilization and the real world.

The only time I've seen anything approaching bustle in this town was after the 92 earthquake when it was swarmed by FEMA - M*A*S*H-size tents, banks of portable pay phones and everything.  Say what you will about FEMA in the Bush years, but once upon a time it was capable of doing a good job.

Every now and then just by luck you get exactly the shot you're trying for.  (Although maybe persistence has something to do with it too.)  But don't let the 'bow fool you - it never stopped raining in the three hours I stayed to wait it out.

I walked down to the river-mouth, nearly blown over by the wind pushing on my back.  The tide was coming in and the ocean was rising to try and drown the river like it does twice a day.

Admittedly the river was pretty feeble - the rain hadn't started to make its way down from the headwaters yet.

Again, luck or persistence.  No matter which, this may be one of the best shots I've ever taken.

This road is beautiful any time of year, and in summer the blackberry bushes along the right side make excellent picking.  But a little color really brings it out.

If I were to ever find myself in possession of enough money so I never had to work again, I'd get a property somewhere in the Mattole valley and rarely leave it.

Put up for the night in Ferndale, 15 miles south of Eureka.  Ferndale boasts a lot of restored Victorians (including the very expensive Inn in the picture below) and funky, self-conscious antique shops, but it's also got a nice clean and very well-kept lodging in the Fern Motel which I highly recommend to anyone wanting to overnight it here.

This was about the sunniest it got all day when it wasn't actually raining.

Still on the graveyard kick?  In perpetuity, as they say.

Mattole Road runs 30 miles between Ferndale and Petrolia, at an average speed of 30 mph and average width (it seems) of 8 feet.  Just before you get to Capetown - the word "town" is misleading, it's a couple of houses and a bridge over the Bear River, but it used to be an overnight stop on the stagecoach back when Ulysses Grant was in charge of Humboldt County and oil had recently been discovered in Petrolia - you see the Pacific for the first time and fleeting as it is, it's still magnificent.

Cape Mendocino is the westernmost point of the U.S. in the lower 48.  There's a lighthouse, rumors of a Scientology vault with cryogenic storage, and not much else.

The view is way too good for the Scientologists, far as I'm concerned.

The one residence on this stretch of the coast is a cattle ranch right at the foot of Cape Mendocino.  I sometimes wonder how many drowned cows they get each year.

The Mattole River mouth is on the other side of the farthest headland in this shot.

Five miles before Petrolia the road curves back inland.  When I and my friend Pete stumbled upon the Lost Coast in 1986 we camped in the dunes here.  Back then there were no fences or Keep Out signs.  Nowhere can stay lost indefinitely, I guess.

Exquisite as San Francisco is, enough is enough and by Wednesday I was more than ready to hit the road north to the real beaches and hills that you don’t have to share with a half-million others.

And the big trees, of course.  This grove is just outside town on the road to Shelter Cove.

That afternoon was the last full sunlight I was to see for the next two days.

On the seaward side the King Range drops from 4k-ft. peaks pretty much straight down into the Pacific.  Just a few roads lead over it, and they’re poorly-maintained.  That as much as anything else is why the stretch of shore to both north and south of Shelter Cove is called the Lost Coast.

The north end of the Lost Coast at the Mattole River estuary, an hour and a half from Rt. 101 and a world away.

Lovingly maintained and developed by the B.L.M.  I’ve stayed here probably about 20 times since 1991.  Last time in 2001 there was little need for bear-proof trash cans, but I guess the feeding’s gotten good since then.

I had the beach to myself except for the two walkers in the background.

If you guerilla-camp outside the site you’ll never lack for firewood.

The sun went down less than an hour after I arrived.  I should have left Alameda earlier, clearly.

Tuesday was one friend after another, ending up in San Francisco.  When I met Sandi for dinner and tea at Samovar I wouldn’t have predicted the day would end up with us sitting in a Dolores St. coffeehouse unable to converse because a string of passable-to-awful singer-songwriters had taken the place over and wouldn’t shut up.  I thought I left that behind in Austin.

A friend is making and dealing biofuel on the sly.  He was very excited to show me his facilities.

I thought he was kidding about the clandestine aspect until he rolled this aside.  Then I started to get excited too.  How many people do you know have secrets that are worth building a fake bookcase for?

Amanda and I rendezvoued in the Haight and walked around Golden Gate Park for awhile.  This is the same spot the Rain Parade had the photo for their second album cover taken.

Grass-covered domes on the roof and all.  I have to go inside this place when they’re done.

When I lived here this was a relatively small adobe-colored building.  Now it looks like the bridge of a modern warship.  Progress, indeed.

Also a good place to wander when you’re, uh, experimenting.  At night.  Ah, youth.

This corner might be my favorite spot in the city if it weren’t ground zero in rich-fuckers Pacific Heights.  You can’t dis the view looking in any direction, though.  Which is of course why the rich fuckers have a monopoly on it.

While I took a buttload of pictures this trip none of them are of the plane ride because I figure I’m not the type to snap through a window even when I have a window to snap through.  I did however decide I like my flights to the west a lot better than to the east because I find the desert so much more interesting to look at than farmland.

That first night I went to dinner with my hosts Scott and Maira and their daughter Jasmine at Cha-Am in Berkeley, long my favorite Thai restaurant anywhere.  Afterwards we went downtown for gelato and by chance walked right by the former Elks Lodge on Allston that now houses the Church of Divine Man and its seminary, the Berkeley Psychic Institute.  I was a CDM-BPI student/assistant/cultie for a long time in the 90s but hadn’t heard anything about it in a long time so I was curious to know if it was still going.  I guess if they’ve kept that huge-ass fortresslike building business must be pretty good.

OK, I wasn’t a cultie for a really long time, five years or so, it just felt like it at the time.  I dropped out in 97 and filled the space in my life later that year with Burning Man (another cult I was slow to recognize as such), but before that I spent a lot of time in that creaky musty old building.  And I still have my sole tattoo – a rose that is the CDM emblem – to show for it.  I’ll show you it sometime if you’re good.

Both Scott and Maira thought this bike was way cool.  Once I realized that it wasn’t a Giger design after all I lost interest though.

Scott really got off on this sign, though I’m still not sure why even after he explained.  I think the fact that he’s kind of a libertarian at heart has something to do with it.

Today is the halfway mark for the week and everything's quite lovely here in the wonderful Bayrea, just a little hectic.  Also it's fucking raining outside with more promised steadily until my flight out.  This is not why you come to NoCal in October. 

Got lots of photos already uploaded but no time to caption them before leaving for the Lost Coast later this morning and after that I'll be off the net for a day or two at least.  So go on over to the photos section and knock yourself out and I'll be back before you know it.