Ain't a Jail Tough Enough to Keep Me Warden

I escaped yesterday.

I got out of the house and took a nice long car ride up to Marin County. It was glorious. Even the weather cooperated, bright sunny skies with nary a cloud to be found. Just feeling the sun on my face was a wonder.

Betsey took me up there to map out a new tour she was going to be giving to a group in a couple of weeks. Actually it's not so much a new tour since she's taken loads of people to Muir Woods, Stinson Beach, Mount Tamalpais, and Sausalito but not in the order or routing she's being requested to do. Timing being of the essence, she needed to see just how long it would take to get from one point to another and thus be certain not to go over the time allotted to this group. Or in other words, the time they paid for.

So there we were, two slap happy middle aged kids with only each other and the open road ahead of them. The road to Muir woods, once you cross the Golden Gate and exit off the highway, takes you through the small town of Tamalpais, home to the annual Dipsea race and a few of the less hippier left over hippies of Marin. Now the road thins and you must share it with bicyclists decked out in all their speed uninhibiting gear. Not a problem, we've got plenty of time and the speed limit puts them on an equal par with auto traffic.

Once through you climb up and over the mountains till you end up at Muir Woods National Monument, a forest grove of towering redwoods, yet strangely enough one of the most handicap accessible national parks in the country. That is once you can get the lady with the group of ten teenagers to move her van from the handicap parking area. Irony, she's letting perfectly healthy teens off near the entrance to the park instead of making them walk the thousand feet from the regular parking lot -- all so they can spend the day hiking in the park! Unclear on the concept!

We strolled around the entrance area of the park, but with no intention of going deeper. It might be very handicap accessible,  but I still have difficulty negotiating even paved or planked roads. So back into the car we went and off to Stinson Beach. Now we got into the real winding roads, climbing up higher and higher till at last we began to catch glimpses of the blue Pacific. And it was truly blue yesterday, accented with whitecaps breaking toward the beach yet calm as I've ever seen it. Where the ocean met the sky was but a thin line of white, a horizon that stretched into infinity. I thought how could anyone not want to live here? We are supremely lucky to be able to call this our backyard.

From the heights of the mountains we descended into the small coastal town of Stinson Beach. Were it not for knowing that another town, Bolinas, was in fact THE last refuge of hippiedom, Stinson would be what you would imagine such a place to be. Main street, as it were, is filled with storefronts owned by those whose beliefs edge towards the idea that work is an elective duty.  Why not though? If I lived here and the day was as beautiful as that day was I'd put up the "Gone Surfing" sign and head out to the beach as well.

But we had work, such as it was, to do and so back up the winding roads we went. Winding roads. Very winding. Maybe it was the headiness of being outdoors after so long cooped up. Maybe it was the crappy cup of coffee I had before leaving Muir Woods. Whatever, for the first time I can remember I was getting car sick. I actually had to go into the mantra of "it's only a few minutes more". Happy was I when the speed limit signs began to click upwards from 15 MPH to 30 MPH and finally we entered back into Tamalpais with it's gloriously straight roads. 

From there we drove over to Sausalito, home of some of the priciest homes in California but with a view of San Francisco unparalleled in the Bay Area. The best place to view the view is from the deck of the Trident Restaurant and so we headed there. The Trident was the hangout of Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, and many of the other San Francisco rock icons of the Sixties and today it wears that history with pride. A chicken sandwich for me, a beet salad for Betsey and some down time sitting, yes, on the dock of the bay. 

Okay, so I've got a cast on my foot. I'm not tramping through snow, it's not raining cats and dogs, I can feel confident drinking the tap water. Life could be worse.