Arrival at the Seagull Inn
It was 6:30pm on a foggy Thursday in early August when Annika and I checked in at the Seagull Inn in Mendocino. Neither of us had anything keeping us in San Francisco, she still weeks away from starting her junior year of high school and I still unemployed, so we decided that morning to make the nearly four-hour long road trip for a one-night stay in this small town on the northern California coast. We’d visited Mendocino once before but hadn’t stayed there over-night. Finding a room at a B&B right in the center of the village with no two-night minimum and a last-minute discount to boot was the beauty of coming here mid-week.
The Seagull’s owner, Ian, walked us through the gardens of the ten-room, 140-year old, white clapboard inn and then to the Geranium Room, where we’d be staying. After jotting down our hot drink orders and delivery time for breakfast, he left us to settle into our homey queen and double-bedded room, with its purple bedspreads, local artwork and a recently renovated private bathroom.
Dinner at Luna Trattoria
It was a good thing I’d made a reservation as the hostess was politely turning away walk-ins when we turned up a little later that evening at Luna Trattoria, a locals’ favorite serving Northern Italian cuisine in a cozy wood-panelled house set back from the road. While waiting for our table we took a peek at the outdoor dining area in the back, which was hidden behind a wooden door with a sign that read: “into the garden I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” With its sprawling tree branches, lush flower beds and whimsical artwork, it was a festive and stereotypically Mendocino kind of space: somewhere you could almost imagine, as another sign suggested, “dancing with fairies and talking to the moon.”
There was a similar vibe inside, the walls decorated mainly with images of the sun, moon and stars. At our table on the second floor, Annika and I shared a mixed greens salad, pesto gnocchi, flat iron steak and cannoli. The food and service were wonderful, but it was the rare opportunity to spend time one-on-one with my younger daughter that made this meal especially memorable.
Morning Walk at Big River Beach & Mendocino Headlands
The next morning, after a breakfast featuring chocolate bread pudding, Annika and I packed up the car, said goodbye to the Geranium Room and headed out to explore. It was a five-minute walk from the Seagull Inn to the ocean end of Big River Beach via a trail that began behind the Mendocino Presbyterian Church on Main Street and continued through the woods and down a steep staircase that deposited us onto the sand. By the time we got there, the morning fog had burned off and the sun shone warmly from a bright blue sky. A few families with small kids were setting up camp against huge storm-strewn logs while wetsuit-clad surfers strode off into the waves. We followed the river inland a short stretch, Annika venturing knee-deep into its deceptively Caribbean-looking water while I stayed on shore. It was cold, but not too cold for a swim, she insisted, and suggested we come back later with our bathing suits. 
Ready to see more of the area, we climbed back up to the top of the bluff and followed a path through thick blackberry brambles and tall, tickling grasses out to the edge of the headlands. The trail continued north along the cliffs overlooking a rugged and breathtakingly beautiful seascape. There were massive rock formations with caves and arches rising up from the ocean; small coves sloshing like saltwater-punchbowls; the most perfectly picturesque, but completely inaccessible, white sand beaches down at the base of the cliffs; and above all, the violently crashing, hypnotically churning, icy, blue force of nature that created this coastline.
Stroll Through Town & Lunch at the Brickery
At the lookout point for Goat Island, a large, flat offshore rock with a particularly high and dramatic sea arch, we realized we hadn’t yet explored much of the village and decided to turn around and go do that. Walking inland a short distance we found ourselves in a residential area on the outskirts of town and chose a street to follow back into the center, stopping to admire the charming Victorian and New England style houses along the way. With their wooden picket fences and windswept gardens, any one of them, Annika and I agreed, would be a perfect spot to hole up for the winter and write a novel. But we were not the first to have this thought; the eighties TV series Murder She Wrote, starring Angela Lansbury in the role of murder mystery author, Jessica Fletcher, was filmed in Mendocino and featured many of the town’s lovely houses, including the Victorian bed and breakfast, Blair House Inn, as Jessica’s home.
In addition to spectacular coastal scenery and quaint Victorian architecture, Mendocino is known for its many art galleries. Back in the town center, we visited a few of these as well as a used bookstore run out of a creaky two-story house by an elderly man and his Springer Spaniel. But mostly we window shopped, meandering by art galleries, wine tasting rooms, candy shops and boutiques until our stomachs told us it was time for lunch.
We quickly found our way to the Brickery, a brick-oven pizzeria that Ian had recommended, and sat down at a picnic table in its rambling garden. While waiting for our Margherita pizza, I checked my email and saw a message from someone named Stephanie informing me she had just found my credit card on the street near her house in Mendocino! I gave her a call right away and she offered to bring it over to us. What were the chances, Annika and I marveled, that someone would find my card, figure out how to track me down and return the card to me within an hour or so of my losing it? Slim to none, in most places, we agreed. But in Mendocino, happily, things were different.
Afternoon Visit to Glass Beach in Fort Ross
The fog was back in full force by the time we finished lunch and retrieved my credit card from Stephanie. Under such conditions, even Annika wasn’t up for a swim, so we scrapped our plans to return to Big River and decided to check out Fort Bragg instead. I didn’t know if there was anything there worth seeing, but it was only a 15-minute drive north and I figured we could at the very least find somewhere to get an ice cream.
My first impression of Fort Bragg was not great. Driving through town on Route 1, it struck me as a dingy collection of motels, fast food restaurants and strip malls, albeit with a prime seaside location. When we reached what seemed to be the main drag, I turned into a parking lot to take a look at Google Maps and scope out somewhere interesting to go. And that’s when we saw that we’d already found somewhere interesting: the Sea Glass Musuem, which was one of the businesses listed on a sign for the non-descript building we’d pulled up to. I turned off the engine and we went inside.
The museum had two rooms, one, more of a gift shop, selling sea glass jewelry and other items, like the “I Stoop for Sea Glass” bumper sticker we purchased, and the other exhibiting different types and colors of sea glass in glass-enclosed display cases. We took our time examining these and the other artifacts and information in the room. But the most intriguing thing we learned here was that there was a beach in Fort Bragg called Glass Beach that was made up almost entirely of sea glass! Of course, that’s where we had to go next.
Glass Beach far surpassed my expectations. I’d assumed what we’d heard about it was an exaggeration, but no, this truly is a beach made of sea glass. So where did all this glass come from? Well, the story is not so lovely and I won’t try to sugar coat it. For about sixty years, beginning in 1906, Fort Bragg used several different areas along its northern coastline as dump sites, where all manner of junk, including glass items, was thrown onto the beach. While efforts were made to clean up and remediate these dump sites after the last of them, the one at Glass Beach, closed in 1967, enormous amounts of glass had already been swept into the sea over the years. Broken down and polished by the Pacific’s pounding waves this discarded glass was transformed into the smooth, colorful gems that now coat the shoreline at Glass Beach.
Sifting through them in search of the rare blue and purple specimens turned out to be pretty addictive and sucked us in for a good half an hour before I noticed it was getting late. With our pockets full of various shades of green and amber we tore ourselves away from the Mendocino Coast to head back home.