On The Road Again

Carmel-by-the-Sea, California

This will be our seventh January spent at the same rental house in Carmel. And, the answer to the question: do I know how lucky I am? is yes, I do. Although sometimes, even in the midst of your luck, you have to pay for your pretties.

Billy and I left our home in the northern end of Los Angeles at 3:45 on Sunday, January 2nd, en route to spend dinner and the night with our friends who live in Santa Barbara. Now, we live close enough to Santa Barbara that we have often spent a Sunday gardening, then showered, dressed, and climbed into the car to drive to Santa Barbara for dinner. After a day of digging around in the dirt, Brophy Brothers used to be our go-to spot until we had a couple of off-experiences there. Anyway, with all of that aside, we were counting on a seventy to ninety minute drive to our friends' home. Our travel time was generously estimated, or so we thought. It was, after all, the Sunday after a long New Year's weekend which included both the Rose Parade and Bowl game both held in the greater Los Angeles basin. So, in light of that, we conservatively tacked on about twenty minutes to our usual ETA.

Twenty minutes? LOL! Again, we left home at 3:45 with an expected arrival of 5:00-ish. Instead, we arrived at 8:15 pm after four and one-half hours traveling the seventy miles north on Highway 101. Now, I need to underscore that we did not take this experience personally. My friend and pilates trainer, Cathy, was stuck in New York for almost a week just after Christmas. And we heard a horror story or two about people basically camping at Heathrow in a similar nightmare. So, with all of that, as well as our ultimate destination in mind, we sucked it up and tried to make the best of our ten-mph commute at the commencement of our month away from home. We listened to a 2-CD set called Ultimate Broadway. It began with Oklahoma. By the time we made it all the way to Rent, I would have paid rent on a restroom for just a few moments' use. All along the highway, men had no such issue as they pulled over to use the side of the road. After the show tunes, we went to salsa music on my iPod, and finally ended up listening to The Rolling Stones, wishing we had some of Keith Richards' substances to abuse.

But it did will out, and we made it to Santa Barbara, to our friends' lovely home. While we were stuck on the road and after we let them know of our situation, Gwen phoned us frequently to check on our progress. She was making a risotto, so there was no problem holding dinner -- it would be made after we arrived. Henry told us that the wine was set out waiting for us, and we confessed that vodka would be our beverage of choice after this ordeal. Eventually, we arrived. Bathroom: done. Vodka: check. A good dinner, and our January retreat had begun.

We left Santa Barbara the next morning, and arrived in Carmel late Monday afternoon after the rain had swept south through central and southern California. We caught the sunset at Carmel beach. We celebrated our first night, as we always have, at Rio Grill. We are now unpacked, and our larder is stocked. And, we are in Carmel, which in many ways feels like we are home. I never anticipate this feeling when we are in the throes of removing holiday decorations, and packing up what always feels like much too much, before making this trip. In recent years, I find myself increasingly burned-out during that transition, and I often feel that I am sorry we have made these plans. But we push through the pre-trip travails, then travel up the 101 which approximates what was once, in the old mission days, called the Camino Real. We cut in at Salinas towards the Monterey area, and as we approach Highway 1, I finally see a stand of cypress trees. Not all, but a lot of my accumulated stress diminishes in one heavy exhale. Le sigh . . .

And so, from my kitchen table/desk in the little house that we rent here, and at the end of our first full day in Carmel-by-the-Sea, I start my year, by wishing you a happy new year. May it be a year without gridlock. A year without grief. A year to remember for all the beauty and cypress trees it may, perchance, bring to us. Welcome to 2011, and, thank you for reading my blog.

The Houseguest & the Hair Band

Los Angeles, California


Billy and I are back home after an overnight visit to Santa Barbara. Our friends, Gwen and Henry live there; having moved away from our neighborhood, back a little over three years ago. It's fun having friends in Santa Barbara. But, frankly, it was more fun when they lived nearby. The joke back then was that if we had too much to drink, we could crawl home. They lived, if not in crawling distance, certainly within walking distance. Not that we ever had too much to drink. Not that we ever, in any way, drank to excess. Not that we . . . Oh forget it. Here's the drill on that front. Many the time, we lingered over our martinis at their home, calling to postpone dinner reservations. Usually we were going out for sushi. And, there were also the dinners at our homes. I clearly remember the night that we lingered around our round teak table outside, enjoying good wines into the early morning hours. It was warm out, and lovely to linger after dinner. Henry remarked that we could very well lose New Orleans, if the anticipated Hurricane Katrina did its worst the following day. Talk about a calm before a storm.


Alas, our friends uprooted and moved to Santa Barbara. And since we can no longer crawl home, we get to enjoy their hospitality and beautiful home on an overnight mini-break. We spent Sunday up in Santa Ynez Valley, tasting wine and buying Danish sausage at El Rancho Market. Back at their home, we enjoyed more wine (even I'm starting to think that this smacks of overindulgence), and a lovely dinner prepared by Gwen. And finally, in a haze of good food, good wine, and outstanding company, we retired to our guestroom.


Now here's the thing about guestrooms. Ever stay somewhere (like at our house), where the guestroom has all the hand-me-downs from the master? Where you find the towels that didn't quite work in the master bath, and the odd tables serving as nightstands? Ever looked in the closet to discover where they stuffed all the stuff that won't fit in their other closets? Well, Gwen and Henry's guestroom isn't like that. It is, in a word, perfect. Perfect design, perfect bed, perfect linens, towels, etc. But even in a room that reeks of perfection, you can't always expect to find what you forgot to bring. In this instance, I forgot to bring a hair band. What's the big deal, you are probably thinking. Well, I have shoulder-length hair and am used to pulling it up and out of my way when I sleep. And we all know how hard it is to skip out, even for one night, on a long-standing habit. So, I turned my overnight bag inside out. No hair band. I looked in my purse. Nothing. I thoroughly rummaged around in my make-up kit. Nada. No hair band. So I gave up. I clipped my hair up with an alligator clip (not something you can really wear into bed), and proceeded to wash my face. Hmmm. Kinda needed a wash cloth, so I opened the top drawer and Voila! Along with everything else a guest could need, and then some, guess what I found. You got it -- a sealed-in-plastic, brand spanking new hair band.


We've stayed in a lot of swanky places over the last few decades. To illustrate this, I ask you to visualize a room on stilts over the water, in Bora Bora. But I think my favorite hotel/resort is right here in California. It is Auberge du Soleil, located in the Napa Valley. Surely it's about the amenities, but it is most likely also that we've always had such a great time up there in Napa, where we often cap a day of wine tasting and shopping at Dean & DeLuca by stopping for root beer floats at A&W. But even in mind of Auberge du Soleil, I have to tell you that I can't think of any place we've stayed that would have provided me with exactly what I needed, without asking, as the guestroom at Gwen and Henry's did. I highly recommend it, should you be passing through Santa Barbara in the near future. Don't forget the Danish sausage. And, thanks for reading my post.