Part two of the Treehugger Tour.

Kelli and I started the relationship we now have in early 2002, on the first of January as a matter of fact. The first movie we saw was the Jim Carrey movie The Majestic. That movie was filmed in Ferndale among other places like Ft. Bragg. We didn’t say to ourselves, “let’s go stay where they filmed our first movie” or anything, but she found the Victorian Inn and found out the town’s trivia from their site, so then it was a no brainer that we should stay there.

This is standing at the front of the inn. The movie’s diner was a piece of set design fiction that cleverly made a 40’s style tubular shaped diner mask the ugliest building in the town–a retired service station with a recessed facade and long driveway. If this picture was just a bit wider to the right, you could see the gas station. The rest of the town got certain modifications to the building facades, and a parking lot between buildings was the place where the movie theater (Majestic) was constructed, but it too was just a prop. The picture below, if widened again to the right, would show the bank that served as the town hall in the movie.

This was the most cultured building we stayed in, but being old, it was subject to some oddness. We stayed there two nights, and on the first night, while getting cleaned up and rested after dark, the power went off and in one instance, the whole town was blackened! That put a damper on our planned night on the town (all 10 blocks of it), but when the power came on again after some attempts, we did get downstairs to the restaurant, which was very excellent. I did OD on the bread, beer, and taters in my dinner. I think I got carb poisoning or something…the dinner was great, and would have been better had I eaten only half of it! I got a whole pitcher of beer that I thought we’d share, but Kelli got wine, and being one to not let delicious coppery beverages go to waste, I was sure to receive it all with delight. Delight until I wanted to sleep a good night, but had to wizz repeatedly and deal with overwhelming garlic induced gastric issues. Ahem. The next day was a slow start…

After starting off with breakfast and some blogging on the Inn’s computer, we side tripped up to Lady Bird Johnson Grove up in Orick. This is officially as far north as I have been in California. We thought about going up and touching the border of Oregon but this sated our desire to walk among the redwoods. The plaque was from the dedication of the grove. Apparently it happened on Tricky Dick’s watch (Nixon). This is one of the better things we can put him down for… It also allowed us more time to see Arcata which we were interested in because we’ve heard a lot about it from our friends at church–a couple families and two generations, really–who did some living up there for college or just because. We roamed around Arcata and shopped for anything unique there. Kelli picked up an Ani DiFranco CD that put an end to my-music-all-the-time. She had burned her CDs in the wrong format and had nothing to listen to for herself all this time. By far the winning part of the Arcata stop was getting a bottle of Dirty Dick Ale from the local alcohol purveyor. It was a mark of pride to be able to offer people a sip from my Dirty Dick. As it was, no one accepted, and it was left up to me to take the offer. I hope that doesn’t make me a perv.
Ahem…




No drive through trees up here. But some are pedestrian sized.

The real icon of the Treehugger Tour. It just didn’t make a great fake postcard.

The tripod doesn’t tell us to say “cheese” but this turned out okay in spite of that.
Along our day trip to Orick, we stopped at various beaches, and this one offered some good photo ops…

The rock that looks like an otter on its back…

…is but a prelude to the rock that has a seal (or sea lion–I’m not an expert) on it.

Just one of these guys. None to be seen anywhere else.

Maybe he wanted friends. He didn’t flinch.

Another inexplicable spread-eagle pose for no good reason. Maybe if I left my arms down, the shadow would look like I had no arms.

The water here came in so gracefully, and the beaches were so clean of other stuff (kelp, driftwood) that the water made just a glassy surface over the gravel like sand. This made it look a little like a leopard shark.

I just love stark forms that compose themselves in pictures.

Back in Ferndale, we wandered around town after hours and had dinner at a pizza shop that was owned by the son of one of the folks from church! On Wednesday before we cut town, we went in and out of most shops, down some back streets, and into the museum where they had all sorts of Ferndale history on display, including their old telephone switchboard, and a workshop full of farming tools and implements of all sorts.

Kelli found a house that actually makes her look bigger than she is!


After the museum and grand tour of the town, we left for our next night’s stay in Shambala Ranch resort, about 20 miles out from Ukiah and somewhat east of Ft. Bragg. At this point, we began our trek southward, but still had a few days of touring to do. The drive to Shambala took part of the afternoon and we got there after dark, the last 18 miles or so being on an extremely winding road that got us into hairpins and doublebacks that cut us down to 5 mph, else we go into a ravine. Dark and uncertain if we got the right directions, we began to wonder. Later, we found out that Kelli wrote “8 miles” down when it should have been “18″. Oops.

But we did get there sometime in the evening. We got there on a slow week, and we were the only guests in the whole place! This is the common area of the retreat, with cottages scattered about here and there. The manager lady talked to us about the place being off any electrical grid, and being a very “green” place with all sorts of energy saving features, smart building techniques, shared car, and all that good stuff that was immensely interesting to me (I was huge into peak oil that season). We talked peak oil too! This place was the most isolated of all the places we stayed. I liked it a whole lot. The air was all that you could expect–fresh and clean. There was total silence. No activity but for us.

Our cottage from the deck of the main house.

Looking to the other side from the deck.

I can get into this stuff. The room was just nice and cozy. The misty sky masked the tops of the trees.
We had a great breakfast of local cereal and eggs. The kitchen and dining room was in the main house, and we overlooked the pond while we ate, and really had a great time in total isolation. Before we left, the manager lady came by and talked to us about intentional community life and showed us the huge directory of the community of intentional communities, and wished us well on our conversion to a post-peak life. I could have stayed there for a long time.


Something about Shambala brought out the kissy side of us.

Shambala was in a valley that was just green like you’d not believe. This was on the way out when we saw during the day what we had missed the night before–18 snaking miles through hills and valleys.


Moving ahead in our southward journey, we got to Sonoma and fumbled around looking for her friend’s house nearby. As we reoriented ourselves, there was a small row of shops that featured a couple cute touches. The top is hard to see, but the benches are labeled “democrats” and “republicans.” The pig… the pig just spoke to me.

Leaving Shambala was a little sad, but once we got to Ashley’s house situated between two vineyards near Sonoma, it was sort of like Shambala in that it was quiet and special in its way. Her dad had hand built the house, and it had many nice touches. There were many things that made it a place I’d like to stay–the garden, the natural space, the total lack of suburbia for miles, and then…the chickens. They had some small program for food going on, a real well on the property, and a brand new iMac flat panel model that let me offload all my pix onto the cards that had filled up!
Thursday was Thanksgiving, so after a morning of milling about with chickens and just basking in the atmosphere (misty and autumnlike), we piled into a few cars and went down to Ashley’s uncle’s house where we had dinner with a roomful of people I did not know, except for Ashley and her boyfriend who came to our wedding. It was a great dinner, but it truly was odd trying to be in the conversation!
We stayed a second night there at the handmade house with the massive window next to the toilet and the stone shower stall (made of piled rocks like an old time well). That was our departure point after spending some time with Ashley and a friend of hers in Sonoma, looking in bookstores, galleries, and shops in the small town square. From there, we left for a long trip south to San Simeon. We passed through more wine country until we ended up in the far reaches of the east bay area, then cut through Contra Costa county along the eastern bay cities down to 101. That was a drive like any other in LA or San Diego, on Friday after Thanksgiving its all the same. I put the camera away on that leg of the trip; all the good stuff was behind us. We drove down back to San Simeon for a night in a 50% off Motel 6 and spent the evening back in Cambria, where we were just a week before. The next day, the weather was stormy all the way to San Diego, with just a few exceptions. The drive from San Simeon to San Diego took about seven hours in that storm which completely blasted us. I didn’t mind. That was the weather I was expecting, and it was sad to see the trip as a piece of history.

This is the mirror from Shambala’s community room. A little out of sequence, but its a nice place to end.