A Short Trip to Sea Ranch- We Finally Got Away

 

Foggy view from our Berkeley deck right before our trip

We left Berkeley on a foggy morning in mid-October for Sea Ranch on the Sonoma coast just south of Mendocino County. This was our first real trip since our Italian VACATION in the fall of 2019 before the lockdown in March 2020.  Reservations were made on VRBO for a 3 night stay in a little house on Foothill Close in the "tiny town of Sea Ranch which stretches along 10 miles of rugged Pacific Ocean coastline, offering stunning coastal trails and several beaches to explore."  We were renting one of the 2,200 houses in the unincorporated community. I had specially picked one with a sea view!

Gulls on the pier at Lucas Wharf in Bodega Bay

In October 2019 we had planned to stay in our friend Rita's house at Sea Ranch, but had to cancel when fires were raging toward the coast. We also had to cancel a trip to Tahoe this September when smoke from a Sierra foothill fire choked the Tahoe basin. This 3rd time was a charm. On the way north, we followed Rita's advice and stopped in Bodega Bay for lunch at Fishetarian.  Our fish and chips were delicious and I was glad I'd packed a few extra down vests for the chilly damp weather we endured sitting at the restaurant's outside picnic tables.

All bundled up in Bodega Bay

After lunch we wound around hairpin curves on HWY 1 and reached Sea Ranch over an hour later. We followed directions to our cozy house, figured out the lockbox, turned on the heat and made ourselves at home. Here it was even colder and foggier and instead of a sea view I could only spot waves breaking over a few rocks in the distance. The ocean was nowhere in sight. What a disappointment!  We entertained ourselves by visiting the nearby town of Gualala and stocking up on supplies for the wintery night ahead. We imbibed while soaking in the hot tub on the deck, and tried to get Netflix to work.

The next day dawned drizzly and foggier than ever, so we set out for Point Arena to visit Franny's Cup and Saucer, advertised as the best bakery in the area. Before hitting the town we went down to the pier and snapped photos of the sultry ocean and the deserted coffee shop

                  This Swedish fisherman filled us in on information about the area and his colorful life                                 

                                           

The misty town of Point Arena reminded Dean of Wales in the '70s, but Franny's Cup and Saucer, billed as the best bakery in the area, welcomed us with its colorful exterior and tempting scones and pastries.

 

Interior view of Franny's Cup and Saucer

They had one beautiful loaf of artisanal bread, which we coveted. A kind Franney's employee told us it was from the Pelican bakery down the street, which was only open on Wednesday mornings from 8 to 11am. We hustled over there to make it just in time.

After waiting in line outside, we discovered what the excitement was all about. Here was an array of freshly baked loaves that rivaled any rustic breads we had seen anywhere.

We chatted with the baker, bought a yeasted sourdough loaf, and soon regretted not buying more. We felt lucky to have shown up on a Wednesday before 11 am.

On our way back to Sea ranch we stopped at the impressive Russian hotel of St Orres. Many Russians had come down from Alaska in the mid 1800s and you can see their influence in some of the architecture. We made reservations for dinner on Thursday night and toured the grounds.

Though we intended to dine there one night, the scene was so chaotic and the place so understaffed that we left quickly.

Ohlson Pool, one of the two Sea Ranch pools

After touring the area all day, I hit the pool down the road from our house. Because it was late afternoon and foggy I had the pool and sauna all to myself - what luxury!

Wonder of wonders, Thursday morning dawned sunny and bright and as advertised, there was the vast expanse of the blue pacific seen from our deck.

We filled our last day with all the activities we had missed the days before. We drove around marveling at all the Sea Ranch architecture, much more appealing in the bright sunshine, and then visited the "neat little hardware store" that Rita recommended. 

All the Sea Ranch inhabitants patronize this treasure trove of hardware and such, as well as the lively garden center pictured above. And we were very fortunate that the woman at the counter encouraged us to walk up the path to the community garden.

We hiked up a short path and were amazed when we opened the gate and entered a wonderland of flourishing plants and trees. Though not at its peak, the late blooming veggies and flowers were thriving and garden members were greeting each other —and us!—while picking ingredients for a harvest dinner to be held in a few days.

There is a long wait list for membership in the garden community. In fact, technically we weren't  supposed to be there, but a member of the board and his wife, picking late raspberries and potatoes, took us under their wings and explained the garden protocol at length. It was obvious that they felt blessed to live there

We wandered around for a long time taking pictures and basking in the warm, welcome sunlight.

                 In the afternoon we checked out Black Point beach, but it was too windy to hike.

We found a charming little bookstore in Gualala. Actually, the only thing lacking in the area are good restaurants. I guess the Sea Ranchers like to cook at home, but I was disappointed. We ended up eating twice at the Thai restaurant because I was on vacation.

Friday morning was foggy again, so we packed up early and drove down Highway 1 out of Sea Ranch. A short drive down the coast, we stopped at Fort Ross State Historic Park and parked in the lot of the Russian fur trading outpost of Fort Ross.  

 

I knew nothing about the fort, but I learned that the area was settled by Russians who had claimed land in Alaska for fur trapping and expanded to what is now the California coast. They built this fort in 1812 and stayed until the 1860's. The buildings are almost all reproductions but they are so realistic that we could picture life within the fort in the early 19th century. Dean took this revealing photo of the arsenal from outside the bars.

    

         Still shrouded in atmospheric fog, we passed an old scarecrow on our way to the gift shop  

We amused ourselves viewing the displays in the fort's museum and left only after I found the perfect refrigerator magnet.

After about an hour's drive south toward the Bay Area, we stopped at the Valley Ford Creamery and had the best meal of the trip. Their grilled cheese sandwiches were beyond compare and they offered their own chocolate and vanilla soft serve ice cream. We also ordered cauliflower soup and cheese toasts on home baked bread! 

    We enjoyed our lunch outside on picnic tables and finally headed back home satisfied and happy

 

The Monarch Butterfly's Complete Metamorphosis

 

      

My sister texted me a photo of this monarch caterpillar posing on a leaf in her CT garden. How lucky for her. I've never come across one of these colorful creatures and wouldn't have known how to identify it.

   Another view from another garden. Monarch butterflies lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed plants.

Here is  a diagram of the monarch's lifecycle which takes about 30 days. (The adult butterflies live from 2 to 6 weeks.)

 The completion of the four life-stage process - the egg , the larvae (caterpillar), the pupa (chrysalis) and the adult butterfly - is called complete metamorphosis.

These beautiful butterflies, found all across N. America, were officially designated as endangered in July, '22.  Details of their plight can be found on this LINK from PBS.

Fire Season Preparations in the Berkeley Hills

Piles of boards and branches down hill from our house

 Fire season cleanup is in high gear in my North Berkeley hills neighborhood. Piles of dead branches can be seen in the front and back of many houses and every day we hear the loud whine of chainsaws and the whir of chippers in our neck of the woods. Because fires can sweep in from forested Tilden Park up the hill from us, this area is especially vulnerable and cleanup efforts are taken seriously.

Our back slope was littered with old wood discarded when Dean tore down an old retaining wall he rebuilt in 1991. Our downhill neighbors' complaints spurred us into action. Everyone's nervous!

It took 7 hours for Carlos Meza's yard cleanup and hauling service to clear out the piles of wood. Three workers filled their trucks twice. and here's the result- a barren hill.

Last year we had two trees cut down which were dangerously near the house - a no-no in a fire zone. Tree services are in high demand and all over Berkeley efforts to comply with fire safety regulations have left dismayingly bare yards. These businesses cut down trees and haul them away after they feed the trunks and branches into a chipper.

Complete Tree Service sent a skilled crew

                           This is how they did it!   We watched the whole scary event from our deck. 

Two doors down, our neighbor's yard exemplifies the clear-cut look. A few weeks ago the house was hidden by green trees and bushes, now look at it!

The city has a fire fuel chipper program, so many home owners clean up their property and leave piles of debris just off the road, awaiting their designated pickup day.

Piles line Keeler, a few blocks above us

                                                       Our next door neighbor's collection

This one's on Shasta Road

All these piles start to look alike. This one was hauled away a few days ago in a big truck. They didn't wait tor the city to come

      

We participate in a close knit neighborhood group called Shake and Bake which was formed to oversee emergency earthquake and fire preparedness. We communicate frequently by email and every September we meet in person to discuss group business and enjoy a yummy potluck. For the last few years these meetings have taken place on someone's deck for obvious reasons

Jill, our next door neighbor, designed this banner which should be displayed outside one's house in an emergency, to signify that the inhabitants are safe and have no need to be rescued.

Our Westinghouse generator in it's wooden sound insulating box

Like many of our neighbors, we installed a generator to prepare for preemptive PG&E  power outages which could leave us without power for long (or short) periods. After experiencing some of these, we decided to find a generator.  In 2020 during the Pandemic, it wasn't easy to find generators, much less parts to install them, but we persevered. Dean even built a sound deadening box to shield our household from the machine's excessive noise; he also converted the generator from gas to propane. Both of these were major projects which will pay off if the power goes out.

It's still cool and foggy up here, but we're not fooled. Sooner of later there will be heat waves with dangerously high winds and the smell of smoke from fires near and far. So we're checking items off our to-do list and making every effort to prepare for any emergency Mother Nature throws our way

Happy 4th of July Table decorated by Ricki 2022

 

Ricki's house in San Francisco's Richmond district

            Here's the festive balloon decoration that greeted us at Ricki's front door on The 4th of July

                                     And here's another of her fabulous holiday table settings

More fun details from the table with an admirer standing by

 All the guests brought steak to grill and I made this macaroni salad with dill, capers, celery and lemon to go alongside Ricki's coleslaw and grilled veggies. Dessert was gelato with strawberries & blueberries!

The typical July fog came in to obscure the fireworks, so we happily celebrated indoors with more wine 

My Swedish Piggy Bank and a few Surprises

 

      Here's the Swedish handmālat (hand painted)  Piggy Bank my mother gave me many years ago. Unfortunately I can't remember the specific occasion or year of her gift but I'd love to find out. Often she would give a duplicate present to my sister, but in this case she didn't, so I'll never know.

I mentioned my mother's Swedish ancestry a few Christmases ago when I wrote about decorating her four-sided Swedish TREE with mini ornaments she had accumulated.

She loved her set of 6 hand painted Norwegian bowls

She collected all sorts of Scandinavian objects, baked Scandinavian treats and was thoroughly Swedish in appearance, temperament and traditions. So imagine our surprise when my sister started digging around on the internet and discovered that her mother was actually from an island in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Germany called Rügen, and that it's part of Germany, NOT Sweden! The area had been a dominion under the Swedish crown until 1815 but was eventually annexed to Germany.  Her father Karl was from Stockholm, so no surprises there. His family name was Silvfer which he changed to Silver when he came to the US.

Here are some facts my sister unearthed about our mother's mother: She was born on June 3rd 1875 and christened  Gustava Fredrika Wilhelmina Kabeller. Her birthplace was Putbus, Rügen, Germany and a passenger list card certifies  that she arrived in Baltimore, MD in 1893, which would make her 18 years old! 

Pictured above are the rose gold earrings she was wearing when she came to America. She immediately took them off since pierced ears would mark her as an immigrant from the old country.  Fortunately she kept them and passed them on to my mother. Quickly she enrolled in night school to learn English in order to shed her Scandinavian roots and learned to speak fluently without a trace of an accent.

She married Karl Nicolaus Silver and inherited his two children from a previous marriage.  We don't know when our grandmother came to Milwaukee, but we do know that my mother Isabelle was born there in 1906. Like my mother, her brother Ted and youngest brother Bill lived in Milwaukee all their lives. I remember Ted living with my grandmother until she died in 1957; only then did he feel free to marry. I was only 12 when she died but I remember her quite well. 

Though we were disappointed that she was German rather than Swedish, I see that her birthplace is  beautiful and a popular tourist destination. The French travel blog Memoirepleine describes it below:

"Rügen Island is a small paradise of white sandy beaches and turquoise water near the Baltic Sea, in northeast Germany. Mixing old-fashioned seaside resorts atmosphere and Scandinavian influences, Rügen is the perfect getaway for a weekend or more." HERE is the link for a full travelog. 

Rügen's spectacular coastline 

Villas south of the pier on Rügen as photographed by Élodie in her blog Memoirepleine

Sassnitz Harbor on Rügen.   It would be fun to visit her birthplace

In lieu of a photograph of my grandmother, I offer a nostalgic rendition of my mother Isabelle, age 10, with her brother Ted and little brother Bill near their home in Milwaukee.

LOMI vs. MY GREEN BIN

Here's the new Lomi Kitchen Composter

Finally another blog on composting, but instead of my green bin I'm featuring a new, high-tech kitchen composter. An impressive Canadian company called Pela, known for their bio-degradable phone cases, has recently introduced a countertop machine that actually "minimizes food waste at the press of a button." Pela's goal is to create a waste-free future, so for a start they've created this futuristic, high-tech version of a green bin with many fewer steps.  You simply fill it with food scraps, press the button and in a few hours you've turned your leftovers into nutrient-rich dirt. If you don't have your own compost pile and garden, or you live in a place that doesn't have a city-wide recycling program, this sounds like a great solution (all you need is $499.) 

Here's my green bin 10 years ago . It still stands in the same place on my kitchen counter

Though Lomi's  kitchen composter is awesome, I'm not planning on retiring my green bin any time soon.  I praised it ten years ago when I started this blog  and I'm still as enamored as ever. In the first "Me and My Green Bin" post on May 7th 2012, I described "MONDAY MORNING"---  the time when Berkeley recycle trucks pick up green waste in our neighborhood. 

               Exactly10 years later I still collect veggie and meat scraps in my green bin...

...then dump them into the large curbside receptacle provided by the city, which gets  COLLECTED early Monday morning. The previous link describes what happens to the contents of the bins after they are collected.

There are also other solutions: Every week or so my sister takes her food scraps from the freezer in her apartment in Manhattan to her home in CT where she composts it for her garden. Strangely enough, New York City does not have city wide curbside pickups. Instead they have bins near some community gardens and green markets where locals can take their compostable items. I took the photo below in 2015 when I visited the 92nd street greenmarket near my sister's apartment. 

92nd Street Greenmarket vegetation collection

More recently, the city has instituted voluntary green waste collection in selected neighborhoods and the NYC Dept. of Sanitation has issued brown bins like the one below. Despite these minor improvements, my sister Lucia continues to schlep her kitchen scraps to the country for her garden compost pile.

New York CIty's handsome brown bins

With Lomi, the transformation from food waste to compost happens in your kitchen; and it happens lickety split.  Pela has a great Website  with all the details and their weekly newsletter contains fascinating information about their zero waste philosophy.  Lomi News is so useful that I've started saving the emails in a file on my desktop for future reference. Why delete info on topics like the garbage problem or 15 steps to a zero-waste kitchen or can you cook with compost?

I admit I'm impressed with Lomi, but not enough to abandon my green bin and all the low-tech steps that involves. Never fear, "Me and My Green Bin" will continue!

Early Days at Sur La Table and a Souvenir from Ladakh

The rock that Deb brought me after her trip in 2000

My friend Deborah worked with me at the new Berkeley Sur La Table when it opened in 1996. Sur La Table was founded by Shirley Collins in 1972 and had a single retail location in Seattle's Pike Place Market until Seattle power COUPLE Renee and Carl Behnke bought it in 1995. We heard rumors that Ms. Collins had overextended the store's budget by buying too many pieces of French Copper and was forced to sell. In any case, the new owners wanted to expand and decided to open a second store in the developing 4th Street area of Berkeley. All the French copper cookware found its way to the Berkeley store, adding to its allure. I was hired to curate the extensive cookbook collection and Deb came along shortly after we opened. It was an exciting time to be working on booming 4th Street and in the energized Sur La Table spinoff. The company was later sold to an international corporation based in Bahrain and is no longer the fun store we opened. 

Four years years after the Berkeley store opened, Deb decided to travel to Ladakh, the mountainous region in Indian-administered Kashmir which borders on China. It's known as "little Tibet" and is home to thousands of Tibetan Buddhist refugees. I thought the trip was a crazy idea, but I did enjoy following her altitude training and itinerary, which had her arriving and departing from New Delhi.

Tibetan characters on a small rock that I keep on my dresser

 After she left  there were of course no emails, no instagram posts or cellphone photo exchanges, and we didn't hear about the trip until she got home. I remember Deb looking fit, thin and tan when she returned to work, and she had many stories to relate in her inimitable fashion. One included the story behind the souvenir she so kindly brought back for me:

    She had picked up several rocks in New Delhi en route to her trek in Ladakh and then when she arrived she told me,  "she paid a Tibetan monk personally to engrave the mantra 'keep moving' on one side and the date, 8/5/00, on the other."  Since the  Buddhist monk spoke no english, we were never sure of the exact translation. 

I have kept this prized possession on my dresser as she advised and have glanced at it now and then.  The other day I picked it up and was shocked to see that 22 years had passed. Then I wondered what that scrawled blue message actually said; I had always thought it was in Hindi. Luckily Sherab, a close friend of my sister's in CT, got his PhD in Sanskrit at Berkeley, lived on the subcontinent for many years and is fluent in a number of its languages. I sent him a picture of the rock and waited for his reply.

Sherab came up with all the information we could possibly want!  First, he confirmed the language as Tibetan.  He said that Tibetans are famous for writing on rocks. All over Tibet one sees prayer stones and other messages scrawled on rocks, so these small souvenirs made sense.

Now for the translation: Sherab pointed out that Tibetans were not likely to say "keep moving" and without even consulting his dictionary he pieced together a poetic rendition true to the Tibetan spirit and a fitting memento of my friend's trip to Ladakh.

                                        From the path, a beautiful way