The Mill Valley Inn

I wanted to stay in Mill Valley because this is where my mother lived, as a child. Thankfully, we were offered accommodation by the Mill Valley Inn, and glad to be there. Mill Valley has changed quite a bit since the mid-to-late 50's, when my mother lived there. It's an upscale town, now, and the Mill Valley Inn pretty much lives up to that standard.

It's a concrete building that spirals up around what could be a courtyard, but is instead the inn's parking garage. This is maybe not the most elegant view upon exiting a room, but open and interesting, and preferable to the small hallways of most hotels we've seen. The room we have is small, but beautifully decorated with old and/or distressed wooden furniture, amazingly high ceilings, and with gorgeous French doors opening to the town. MVI is the first place we've visited that does not have a Bible in the room. We like this.

Breakfast is all self-serve, but definitely better than the 3-star accommodations we've stayed at, with more and varied fruit options, average sweet/white breads, reasonably healthy cereals, and make-your-own waffles. Self-serve coffee and tea (a nice assortment!) are available, but so are various espresso and steamed-milk beverages, from the kitchen. An open wine-and-cheese reception is held every afternoon in the breakfast room, and I assume that the doors are opened to the patio in better weather (it's raining while we're there).

Although the inn as a whole is clean and quite comfortable, when we asked for a mattress or cot for the children, who were sleeping on the floor, we were given a very old, stained mattress with a sheet over it. This is by far not the worst thing we've seen in hotels on this trip, but not really up to the standard the Mill Valley Inn has set for itself. I am going to assume it was just a glitch.

On the whole, MVI is a lovely, calm, quiet place to stay, close enough to San Francisco without needing to be in the urban madness, and a good place to relax, if you can afford it. It's a great place for an afternoon bit of Asterix-reading:

Bad plants, good plants, and a healing crescent moon.

Today was our trip from Mendocino to Mill Valley. We harvested some eucalyptus before leaving the Mendocino area, and hung it around the ceiling of our car to decorate our ride! Although it smells great, eucalyptus is an invasive weed, wreaking havoc on various US wildernesses. Eucalyptus depletes groundwater needed for indigenous plants, takes over and changes habitats, thus vastly reducing habitat for many plants and animals, and can carry deadly spores. It seems to be everywhere in california, in the towns, in the parks, and in conservation areas, but thankfully it is not able to withstand our winters, and has not taken over up here, yet. But wait! ArborGen has now received federal permission to introduce vast quantities of its genetically modified eucalypti (designed to withstand cold climate) across the US south, in an "experiment". It seems taking over one latitude with invasive, destructive weeds isn't enough. There have been a few petitions out in an attempt to stop this insanity. Sign if you care: http://www.globaljusticeecology.org/petition.php

And here is one wilderness that is now threatened by the Eucalyptus:

Look up. Under, behind, around, and sometimes even above those Sequoias are Eucalyptus. Everywhere.

We drove south to Mill Valley, arriving just in time to see the moon reach its full-sickle brightness, and to take a post-car-sickness walk under its light. It's hard to see ecological devastation anywhere, especially in treasures like the redwood forests, but somehow the timlessness of the moon is reassuring. When humans are gone, and redwoods, and even ArborGen, the moon will look down on this place, crawling with some unfathomable assortment of super-hardy plants and animals, and keep on shining. We try to let the sadness we witness be a lesson but not a downer. Tomorrow we're going to try to find human love in San Francisco.

(I like my camera.)

The Inn at Schoolhouse Creek

Lilies by the koi pond.

One of the MAMA Project sponsors was the Inn at Schoolhouse Creek, run by Maureen and Steve. They put us up in a fully wheelchair-equipped cabin (ramp, accessible bathroom with shower seat, etc), that had one king-sized bed with a sumptuous mattress, and a day-bed with an extra trundle bed to pull out. We were a bit in heaven! A gas fireplace kept us warm despite the unfortunate chilly weather, and for extra heat we all got in the giant jacuzzi tub in the cabin and had a soak. The Inn, a collection of cottages, is nestled among quite a few large cypress trees, just a short distance from the ocean.

Note the disappointment on the left. She returned the deed on her next turn.

Outdoor amenities include a hot tub, hammocks, a giant chess set, and pooch-parking for guests whose companions would like to be close-by during meals. They feed the birds every morning during breakfast, for guests' entertainment. And breakfast was really great. It consisted of self-serve baked goods, toast, cereals, etc. and options for various delicious hot meals (omelets, french toast, pancakes, fritatta, etc.) from the kitchen. They also made an effort to cater to our children's allergies. Options to bring breakfast back to the cabin or for dinner, later, are also available.

We didn't have our dear Hazel with us to make use of the pooch parking, but we saw another dog waiting patiently there during one of our breakfasts.

The Creekside Restaurant!

Birds and a chipmunk having their breakfast.

Breakfast time!

Mendocino

A bit tired from the grueling drive into Mendocino, yesterday and a MAMA interview today, we took a break to explore the sandstone and seashore of Mendocino.

We stood on the giant rock formations, watching some seals playing below...

...in the beds of multiple seaweeds, some of which were the first giant kelp we've seen yet.

We explored the life on the rocks and in the tide-pools.

Turquoise limpets,

goose-neck barnacles,

etc.

Some other beachgoers had their cats with them. Some of the cats explored the beach; this one stayed home!

Cold and tired, we went back to our cabin at the Inn at Schoolhouse Creek where we made ourselves some hot pasta on our excellent little induction cooker. Phewf. Family jacuzzi in the cabin, and early to bed.

Elk Meadows, Klamath

Somebody let their dogs out on the wild elk.

The elk prevailed.

And they went back to their grazing.

The Other Side of the Klamath: The Spit and Brush Dance Site

We went to see the Yurok Brush Dance Site on the way out to the spit. The Brush Dances normally happen in July, so the area is still quite overgrown with grass.

Geneva told me about her experience with her daughter in the pit. The roofs come off of the pit-houses, and the mother with child (who is the focus of the brush-dance) live inside for 4 days - the duration of the ceremony. She talked about sitting in the pit with her baby, and listening to all the dancing around her, then looking up to see the many many people looking down, all in honour of her and her baby, and how whole she felt; how home, and how special. Her mother Jan talked about the feeling of participating in the Brush Dance, knowing that her feet are walking the same patterns in the same regalia, on the same ground that her mother's and grandmother's did, and how whole it made her feel, and how home. This is the site of continuity; of the passing down of family, tradition, knowledge, healing, and potential.

And of course this spit: the place for fishing, gathering, and community, is right next to the Brush Dance site.

Oregos looks over at the spit from Woge's beach, across the river.

Tal made a Mt. Rushmore-ish sculpture on the sand-bank.

People were fishing for red-tailed perch, which swim in the trough just offshore.

The spit is so vast and expansive that, when mostly deserted as it was this morning, it feels nearly hollow. There is a sort of sucking wind that takes voices out to sea, and people just barely shrouded by mist are inaudible and seem to be miles away.

At other times, the spit is populated by birds and mammals. Today there was only a skeleton.

Everything seems to be big and wide. Even beach-writing. Rhiannon cut her fingers on a stick and wrote a message in the sand to encourage us back to the band-aid-box in the car. This message was nearly 100 feet long.

ReQua, Klamath, Oregos, & Wogé

We spent two nights at the ReQua Inn on the Yurok Reservation at Klamath, just south of Crescent City.

The mouth of the Klamath River, with the sand-spit visible on the left. (Click to see full-size.)

Wogé, in Yurok, means 'guardian spirit' (and is also the local tongue-in-cheek name for white person). This Wogé lives up to his name. As we parked our car by Sweet Grandma Lavina's gate, there were no other humans anywhere in sight. Wogé met us at his front gate, which also happens to be the top of the trail down to the beach. There was no hesitation, and also no social fussiness. He had a mission, and that was to be our guide.

Wogé took us down to the beach.

See that rock at the end of the beach? We walked past her on the way down.

She looks like a woman carrying a burden-basket.

Her name is Oregos. People pray to her and she takes their burdens away. When our host Geneva came home to live at Requa, she despaired that she might not find a partner on the reservation. So she went down to pray with Oregos. She made a list of the things she wanted in a man. 3 surfers came in from the beach, and she and her mother joked that they were the answer to her prayer. Before too long, she traveled to New Zealand, where she met Reweti, a Maori man who became the answer to her dreams.

The spit across the water was populated by various fishers.

Most were catching salmon, and thankfully we ate some of that fresh-caught salmon, beautifully prepared for our dinner by the artistic chef at the ReQua Inn. Thomas, Geneva's brother, serves a beautiful assortment of local, homegrown and wild foods. They're not cheap, but they're utterly worth the money. Some favourites of ours were the homemade yogurt, lemon-poppyseed hotcakes, the rich red salmon, the home-made mountain-tea icecream, and the acorn tart. The acorns were harvested further away and bartered for seaweed from Klamath. The Mountain Tea was locally harvested, as were the salmon, and some of the herbs and veggies. And the chicken was smoked that day as "a bit of an experiment" behind the Inn. All were delicious.

The fishers were catching the fish along the edges, laying nets in the eddies. The fish swim up in the eddies, because it's easier to get up the stream and to escape the sea lions who wait in the centre of the river to catch their meals. This particular sea lion was using the fishers' strategy, and was only about 15 feet from the shore.

We also saw our first up-close pelicans!

They seemed to be the most personable birds we'd ever met! We didn't get much closer than this, but the way they stood around just looking at us was fascinating!

Wogé used to be Reweti and Geneva's dog, but their first daughter TeMaia was allergic to him, so he went to live with Sweet Grandma, who lives in the house her grandfather built, near the water. After Wogé showed us around, introduced us to all his special games (chewing sticks, jumping on waves, barking at waves, etc.) he waited for us. When it was time for us to go, he led us back up the path. The neighbours' dogs barked at us, so he went and got them, somehow convinced them to stop barking, and brought them over to introduce to us. He sat patiently while they interrogated us. Then, as we were leaving, he stood by to watch, before heading back to his house.