Bodega Bay

My Soroptimist Tea Diva gang had our annual retreat last weekend. We rented a three bedroom house at Bodega Bay -- gorgeous place for a weekend getaway. The pictures are Penny and Cynthia sitting on the floor to work on the puzzle and Joanne and Barbara relaxing on the couch with Penny in the foreground. I hadn't realized how much time Penny spent sitting on the floor.

Unlike our usual outing sites, this isn't a shopping trip for the ladies. Bodega Bay, in fact, has almost no shopping. We watched movies, took a couple of hikes, put together a puzzle, made souvenir bracelets, and laughed and talked and ate. Just being together is great. We liked the house and the area so well that we plan to return next year (we had been gypsies, moving to a new place every year).

One of our good friends and her husband retired to Bodega Bay a few years ago and Linda served as our guide. She and her husband sold a remarkable house here in Sacramento and are nearly finished with an equally remarkable house in the hills above the bay. From the back of their new home they will have a panoramic view of the ocean and a wild coastal canyon. Her company (as well as her husband, David's) is probably one of the reasons we decided to make BB our annual place to go.

One hike was along a path to the top of Bodega Head. The climb up was fine, but going down was another case for me. On the way up we noticed that there sometimes seemed to be a double path, with the eastern (inner) half about six inches lower than the outer half. We wondered what caused that. I have a bit of vertigo (really a fear of precipices, but I don't know what to call that). Sometimes the path was right at the edge of a fairly steep drop. To get past those places on the way I just looked at my feet and hung on to the bushes at the side of the path -- and walked in that inner portion of the path. I'm apparently not the only person whose mind says "This is perfectly safe, silly" and whose gut says "You are going to trip over your toenails and roll all the way down the side of this hill and be dashed to death on the rocks or drown in the Pacific Ocean. Help!" The view from the top was worth it and I would certainly go up again.