It took me a while to find the tiny burg of Bolinas. Minneapolis transplant and now famed meat producer Bill Niman had warned me about that. "As soon as the state would put up a Bolinas sign on the highway [Hwy. 1], someone removed it," he had said. "They finally gave up."
But I hugged the California coastline north of San Francisco and finally found the town, where wary residents lollygagged outside clapboard buildings but didn't have time for interlopers. About all that seemed to have changed since the 1960s was the hairline on these aging hippies.
Rather than arouse their suspicions further, I strolled until finding the Coast Café, where the staff was gracious, their smiles as fresh as the crab, dill and corn in the enchiladas.
I would find this quintessentially Californian dichotomy throughout the Marin coastlands. Its people are cool and warm, hip and earnest, laid-back yet fiercely protective of their alluring turf.
And who can blame them for being so territorial? To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, they found paradise and are not about to let anyone pave it and put up a parking lot.
This 60-mile stretch, from Muir Beach to Dillon, is wind-swept and truly temperate, rarely veering outside the 30- to 70-degree range. The well preserved, rolling terrain is so green and lush that "verdant" seems an inadequate descriptor.
While driving along Hwy. 1, I found it almost unfathomable that I was in a county with a quarter-million people, thanks to the jammed megalopolis a few miles to the east.
This is especially true on Point Reyes National Seashore, a 20-mile peninsula that seems like a geographic microcosm of the British Isles. White cliffs here, grassy hills and dales there, crashing seashore over yonder.