Del Mar, California 92014
As many of you know, I have been engaged in a search for the Perfect Place for the last few years. I think I have found it. Del Mar, California, 20 minutes north of San Diego, 80 minutes south of Los Angeles, on the ocean (duh). I flew out to San Diego on Monday to complete my tour of all of the parts of the California coast that are reachable by car -- a tour that has been underway for about 2 years now. I had never been to San Diego. My initial reaction was that it is much hillier and much smaller than I had expected. When you land at the airport you feel that you are about to land in someone's back yard, right next to the Weber grill. You get into your rental car and about 4.5 minutes later you in downtown. You are actually downtown already when you land in your airplane, but it takes 4.5 minutes to figure out how to get out of the Avis parking lot.
I will spare you the story of our lunch in the gas lamp district of San Diego and our drive through Mission Beach and La Jolla, and get to the first really interesting thing, which was Torrey Pines. Torrey Pines, as some of you know, is the town where Scott Petersen got arrested for murdering his pregnant wife Laci Petersen in Modesto and dumping her body in the San Francisco Bay. He got arrested right at the Torrey Pines Golf Club, which we drove by. He was trying to disguise himself by dying his hair blonder and growing a mustache. My traveling companion did not know any of this and was much less interested in these facts than I was. Just past the Torrey Pines Golf Club is the Torrey Pine State Reserve.
The Torrey Pine is a very rare California pine tree that only grows in the Torrey Pine State Reserve and in one other tiny place -- one of the Channel Islands, I think. The State Reserve is a chunk of land on the coast that slopes down at about a 30 degree angle to sandstone cliffs, that drop a hundred feet (maybe more) into the ocean. You drive up to the top of the slope and then you can hike down the half a mile to the cliffs. On the way you go by several Torrey Pines and walk through all kinds of succulents and other thick, dense, sedge-like stuff ( I looked some of it up -- there is bladderwort and the giant sea pea and something I called "sea green beans" (because that's what they look like) and various kinds of yucca - one with a seed pod that looks like a pickle and one with a seed pod that looks like a bell pepper -- and California Ocean Mahogany and some manzanita, etc.). Lots of locals jog the trails down to the cliffs and back. At the cliffs themselves The Authorities have strung thin barbed wire along the edge and posted tiny signs that say UNSTABLE CLIFFS -- KEEP BACK . There is no sound except the wind. Everyone moves silently among the succulents as if they are in a boxwood maze at a cathedral somewhere. There are pelicans overhead. People drop out of sight temporarily and then reappear several hundred feet away. You can sort of watch the progress of your fellow hikers along the 30 degree slope but not really, because the 30 degree slope is not as flat as it looks. We, for example, found a tunnel through the undergrowth that you could walk in hunched over and not been seen by anyone on the surface at all. We kept coming across lizards on teh sandstone paths and squirrels (they are regular squirrels but we decided to call them sea dogs) on the paths. I LOVED Torrey Pines. We stayed there until the sunset.
But then we got to Del Mar. Del Mar is a very small community on a little bay that faces north away from San Diego and which is built around the Del Mar Racetrack, "Where the Turf Meets the Surf." It is NOT a tourist town, instead it is like the Mayberry of North County. The racetrack was built by Bing Crosby in the 30s to bring thoroughbred racing to the sea, and it is a huge Spanish-style complex with jacaranda trees and bougainvillea and plumbago and palm trees everywhere. The buildings are salmon-colored and majestic. It is about 200 feet from the beach -- on a windy day the horses going around the last turn could get hit with sea spray. We visited it around 10 a.m. one morning and there was no security anywhere and we drove all through the back barns and got right onto the track itself and saw the practice track and practice stating gate and watched them water the turf. We were the only people there. It was silent and sunny.
The rest of Del Mar is a collection of beautiful homes and one exceedingly nice hotel/spa, the L'Auberge Del Mar, where we are staying. This hotel (indeed, the whole town), is covered in bougainvillea and plumbago and a white flower that smells powerful, like a narcissus. We are one block from the beach. Everything important in Del Mar is within walking distance.
There is no noise here. All the furniture in Del Mar is plush and comfortable. All the store signs are tasteful and discrete, yet informative and helpful. All the people are tan, healthy, and young, yet pleasant and nice to be around, even though they are indisputably perfect. The dogs people walk in the parks are adorable and well-behaved; there is no need for pooper-scopper laws. Babies don't cry here. When you order white wine for lunch at an outdoor restaurant, it stays cool even though it's 80 degree out. The gas tank always reads FULL, no matter how far you drive. You get 8 hours of restful sleep here no matter when you go to bed, and no matter when you get up in the morning. No-one here ever has a bad hair day. People commute to San Diego on the train that goes along the ocean cliffs and gets sprayed with salt. It's called the Coaster. It takes 15 minutes to get downtown on this train, which comes every 20 minutes or so and has a lovely bell tha tyou can hear from all the outdoor restaurants and from our pool. The train station is across the street from the beach, about 5 minutes walk from our hotel. It's called the Del Mar Surf Station. Del Mar is like that town in the Walgreen's commercial -- PERFECT.
In addition to the racetrack, there is the Del Mar Horse Park which is a big operation with English style jumping and training and extensive polo fields, ringed with eucalyptus trees. We visited an Arabran stud farm and some Appaloosa farms up the valley on the way inland. We also visited an Ostrich farm, and an emu farm. After all that, and after the sun went down, we swam in our heated pool under the jacarandas and the palms and the super-nice-smelling white flowers, and then sat in the hot tub, and then went back in the pool, then back to the hot tub, etc. Even though the sun had set, the sky was still blue, just a very dark blue. I floated on my back in the heated pool and looked up between the palm trees and the jacarandas at the stars in the dark blue sky and listed to the Coaster train whistle and listened to the surf and thought about how perfect Del Mar is.
Del Mar is so nice that we have decided to spend the rest of our week here, even though we are supposed to go on up the coast. We went up to Laguna Beach last night and took one look around at the claustraphobic, noisy, congested, crowded touristy town and said, "to heck with this, we're going back to Del Mar." So we cancelled all our other reservations and called L'Auberge Del Mar and begged them to take us back.
They were very understanding. They said this happens all the time. They said they always keep rooms open because people come for a night and then two nights later they are back. We asked them why that happens so often. They said, "that easy, there's just no place as wonderful as Del Mar."
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