We have been to Mendocino a number of times now, which is pretty impressive for a town that only boasts a population of 900. Don’t get me wrong, its a pleasant town and a beautiful piece of coastline, but as was pointed out to me on one of my last visits, its 60 miles from the nearest Walmart, which makes it one of the most remote spots in the lower 48 states. We don’t actually go to Walmart very often, but what we do think about when we come up to places like this is whether we could live in a place that is so remote. Mostly we think in terms of what kind of people choose to live in places this remote. It’s like practicing your scuba diving. You start out going down 30 feet and then coming up to the surface, and then you go down 100 feet and see how that feels. Finally you go all the way to the safe limit of 130 feet and you stare through your mask at your surroundings, listening to every breath you take, breathing in and then out and then over again and stare at your surroundings as though you are in another world. You know things are not totally normal, but you also know that things live down at this depth and seem to do OK with it. If you should ever rip off your mask in a fit of the “jump off the bridge craziness”, you would swim with all your might to the surface and gasp for air whether you were truly in danger or not. That’s what its like here in Mendocino.
We were scheduled to arrive in Mendocino yesterday at 5:30 PM. When we left Cambria the car GPS said we would arrive at 4:30 PM. I figured that was about right because that left us an hour in a long day for a few stops and maybe even lunch. The drive to Paso Robles and then north to Salinas was pretty much as expected, except that it was a prettier ride than I had remembered because I always feel that being forced to avoid Big Sur means that we have to travel inland, and I usually translate that into meaning that we’ll have a boring drive. But it really is a pleasant drive with lots of lovely countryside in the traditional Golden, Californian way. We then cut over towards Santa Cruz, which turns out to be a very confusing little town where we almost lost our way. We finally got on route #1 heading north along the coast and I was blown away. I’ve never driven from Santa Cruz up to San Francisco along the coast, and I always figured, given. it’s proximity as the crow flies to Silicon Valley, that it would be only so interesting. Not so. That stretch of road is almost as pretty as I’ve seen on the California coast and I will remember to take that ride whenever I’m headed this way. It took us up through half Moon Bay where we were supposed to stop at Sam’s, a famous chowder spot. But Sam’s was a chaotic mess so instead we stopped for an overabundant sandwich lunch and then headed up to Daly City. The drive through Western San Francisco heading to the Golden Gate Bridge is something I have done before and it’s not particularly memorable other than to force one to wonder why everybody loves San Francisco so much. From that point on, given that it was Friday afternoon (granted early afternoon), the traffic was very reasonable as we headed up to Petaluma.
This is where our northern coast adventure began, and we headed towards Bodega Bay with the normal recollections of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. After a normal amount of Tippy Hedron conversation, we squiggled our way north along the coast dipping in and out of river and stream openings for a very long but magnificent 80 miles until we got to Mendocino. The biggest thing we had to contend with along the way was that it is at this time of year that the road crews get these tortured, small, but heavily traveled roads repaired for the winter. Since they are narrow two lane roads to begin with, that means stopping traffic and allowing only one directional traffic from the other direction to go and then back again. I think we encountered three or four of these stoppages, and while none of them was particularly long-term, it did chew up what little bit of extra slack time I built into the schedule. In typical fashion with one half of a mile to go until our turn off, we encountered our last one lane construction delay. I suppose it’s like slapping yourself in the face, after three hours of working our way up the coast turning off on the road to our hotel. It felt like blissful relief.
We had driven past the place that we’ve stayed in the past in Mendocino, the Heritage House Hotel, tucked into one of the magnificent coves. They have priced themselves out of our budget, so I booked us into a place called the Mendo Bungalows. Now that we’ve stayed here, I think it’s fair to say we will come again and stay here until the Mendo Bungalows price themselves out of our budget. So goes the world of retirement. We live on a fixed income, but the rest of the world doesn’t.
We dined at Trattoria Luna, a place we have frequented before. It’s such a typical Mendocino place that our outdoor dining was interrupted by a visiting skunk, who was well known in town and luckily comfortable enough around people to not spray us. Saturday morning in Mendocino felt a lot like the Hamptons when I went to buy lattes and coffees for our gang. And then I stopped at a general store to fill up the gas tank. I stopped short and backed away from the pump slowly when I saw it was priced at $10/gallon. I decided to get my gas up the road in Ft. Bragg at half that price. Later when we crossed into Oregon, I topped off at $3.69/gal for premium.
Mendocino is a nice enough town, but I’m not sure without that title song by Doug Sahm, recorded by the Sir Douglass Quintet in 1969, that it would be able to get away with $10/gal gas. The next time we feel inclined to come up this way, we will stay again at the Mendo Bungalows, but we’ll come with a full tank of gas.