NORTHERN CALIFORNIA:
ROOMS FOR ROMANTICS
Story and photography
by Margaret & Eric Anderson

So let's see what you get when you've shaken off your dreadful memory of our terrible September 11 called your travel agent, grabbed a flight to San Francisco and headed north in your rented car.

Route 101 isn't as glamorous as California's Coast Route l but it provides a faster run for travelers who've spent too much time in an airport and now need concrete beneath their tires. The Golden Gate and Sausalito fall behind followed by Petaluma, Home of the World Wrist Wrestling Championship! This is George Lucas country. The movie that launched the careers of so many of today's stars, American Graffiti, was filmed here as was Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married.

A short drive further on takes you to where the true Northern California experience begins at Route 128 which twists and turns under towering redwoods northwest for miles until it reaches the coast. Ten miles later you're in Mendocino. The town looks familiar and it should.

The movie people see it as New England in California. You've seen it in Johnny Belinda, East of Eden, Frenchman's Creek, Same Time Next Year, The Russians Are Coming, Summer of '42, Overboard and, of course, as Cabot Cove Maine in Murder She Wrote.

Many inns bill themselves as the true Mendocino experience. The Stanford Inn By The Sea where Big River runs into the ocean is a particularly good choice. Joan and Jeff Stanford have turned a motel into an attractive 25-room inn. Jeff, a former anthropologist, understand the area's popularity.

"Mendocino," he says, "evokes in visitors a feeling of what a small American town should be like. They walk through and see people nodding to each other - and caring about others' lives. We've been very busy working on that, making sure we don't blow it. You can go the wrong way so easily."

No, they got it right. Ponderosa pine paneling, wood-burning fireplaces, antique English armoires, Hepplewhite tables, Stiffel brass lamps, coffee machines, decanters of red Burgundy and truffles on the tables and bottles of Sundial Chardonnay in the room refrigerators all seem to be the right stuff for guests.

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