Friday, February 20, 2009

Sea Ranch heaven








My friend Susan and her daughter Stella invited us to join them at their house in Sea Ranch. I was in heaven from the moment I sat behind the wheel. I miss road-tripping, it was part of my East Coast life but I seemed to shed the habit when moving to SF. The 3 + hour drive went quickly, wending through the spring hills of west Sonoma county and heading to route 1. I'd definitely been in the city too long, everything looked magical to me, it helped that the end-of-winter light was still low in the sky. Susan is a fount of knowledge and she regaled me with stories of the beginnings of Sea Ranch (http://www.mcn.org/searanch/history.html) the entire way. The children were so tolerant of how much we drove around once we were there scoping the architecture of the development and spotting the signage designed by Bobbie Stauffacher Solomon, including the famous rams head sign and the wave road graphics.

The children did not want for nature. We spent a morning along a fern-lined fairy trail and a hot spot for my children was the magestic madrone tree out front, E + E spent a good part of the last day in it. I even climbed up a few levels and devoured some of the new biography of Zelda Fitzgerald that Susan loaned me. I loved how protected I felt in the tree, with the low-lying branches, and the tuft of greenery that seemed to only be on the ends of the branches, leaving smooth branches to scramble on. Before heading home we went to glass beach and went tide-pooling, spying periwinkles, starfish, and collecting treasures for future art projects, which made the ride home all the more memorable with smells of the seaweed wafting through the car.