... .  .    .       .joeberkovitz.com

Faulty Paradise

January 23, 2009 on 2:04 am | In Travel | 4 Comments

Here are some photos from a recent trip my wife and I took to the Northern California coast. We traversed the whole length of Marin and Sonoma, and covered a good bit of Mendocino as well.

This was our room in the first B&B we stayed in.  It is nestled in a canyon the tiny West Marin town of Inverness, just south of the Point Reyes Peninsula.  The room was exotically situated, perched on top of a spiral staircase and accessible via the top from a long wooden bridge.  Mist is burning off the bridge in this picture because the entire structure was covered in rime ice when we woke up.

This looks all cool ‘n’ everything, and the structure was neat, but the place was very sketchily decorated on the inside considering its high cost (faded blue shag carpet does not belong in a B&B that costs over $200 a night), and the breakfast cook was kind of grumpy and weird.  The owners were not to be seen — other people manage the place.  To get to the bathroom in the night required a trip across the icy, slippery wooden bridge, which made the whole tower shake.

Not that this mattered.  The area is beautiful and we spent all our Inverness days in the outdoors.

The Point Reyes peninsula casually jutting out into the Pacific, hoping to trip up a ship or two.  Peninsulas these days are so ill-mannered.

This one traveled some 300+ miles north on the Pacific Plate to get to its current location, sliding along the San Andreas Fault.  It took its original rocks and plants with it — never leave home without your ancestral flora and fauna!

This looks like some kind of vegetable that Benoit Mandelbrot’s mom probably made him eat until he invented fractal geometry.  It’s a type of cauliflower that we picked up at a neat organic grocery in Point Reyes Station.  It tasted exactly like… cauliflower.  Fresh cauliflower, though!

We saw a lot of little orange salamanders walking around.

On the last day of our trip we took a spectacular hike through the northern reaches of the Marin Headlands, just south of Muir Beach.  The fog and light were spectacular:

Not much more to say about this!

4 Comments