I'm in Del Mar again. Back at L'Auberge I love it. There's no real reason to love it so much. It's rather inconvenient to downtown San Diego. It is not the MOST luxurious hotel ever. It doesn't have the BEST view (actually has no view at all). It is smooshed between Highway 101 (Camino del Mar) and the cliff down to the beach. The Coaster and Surfliner trains run between the hotel and the beach and so crossing bells ring 24 hours a day. The pool is very small. There are no lush gardens to stroll around in. Various airborne military things buzz around from nearby Camp Pendleton. Nevertheless, it is my favorite place in the world. WHY?
It is one big beach cottage. Lots of multi-leveled gabled roofs and french door patios. White trim. Big comfy beds in rooms ornamented with coral and pressed seaweed picture boxes and shell lamps. My room this time has a turtle lamp. The books in my room include "The Outdoor Living Room" and "How We Live By the Sea" and "Pacific Modern" and Cottages by the Sea" and "Beach Houses." In the hallways there are pictures of the ocean and then of the Del Mar race track and Polo Grounds with all the pretty horsies. Surfing and horses is what this town is all about. The decoration is so nice and mellow that you feel you could actually replicate it in your home. It's not fancy. Just very very nice. If it's so easy to make a room this nice, one begins to think, why not do it wherever you happen to live? Could it be that life this is good is so doable? Why yes! This is why Del Mar makes me happy.
And the grounds -- even though smooshed between the highway and the cliff down to the beach -- are lovely. They've landscaped so that the place seems much bigger than it it, and very private. The porte cochere is one level down from the street, and the retaining wall is covered in plantings. There are fruit trees between the side of the restaurant and the retaining wall. A descending natural amphitheatre protects the other side of the restaurant from the street. The spa cushions the hotel from 15th street. The tennis courts cushion the hotel from the other side. In L'Auberge, you are nestled into a nice snug basket of pom pom flowers and jacaranda and palm trees and lemon trees and Torrey pine trees and all kinds of succulents and sedums.
The public spaces are like big wide open porches in the summer. The lobby is one big open air room with all kinds of couches and arm chairs. The floors are wide, unvarnished wood planks. The sea breeze blows right in one side -- over the waterfall and the firepit -- and right out the other side where the valets get your car for you. I have never seen any of the doors closed, ever. It is always 70 degrees in the lobby. The restaurant oozes out all around everywhere. There is an actual dining room but it is not used much and instead people sit out on the back patio under the amphitheatre, or out on the terrace by the waterfall and firepit, or around the pool, or in the lobby, or at the nice white marble bar tucked discretely on one side of the open air living room. Everyone is happy in the lobby. Kids in bathing suits, grownups in beach gear, some business people grinning at their good fortune to stay in L'Auberge without paying for it, and today -- for some reason -- a troop of bicyclists all decked out in their spandex cycling gear. Someone asked them if they were parked outside. I thought that was dumb. They had obviously arrived on bicycles.
Everything at L'Auberge faces the sea. Most rooms can see some part of the sea and every room has a patio. To get to the sea, you walk out the back of the hotel, beyond the pool, and down a little flight of steps. Then you follow a winding path down a hillside covered in flowering ice plants, down some more steps, more path (starting to get covered in sand at this point), and then you are at the train tracks. The driveway to the Del Mar Surf Station will be to your left. Sometimes you have to wait for the Coaster commuter train or the Amtrak Surfliner to go by. Then you cross the train tracks is the Powerhouse Park, which is a big bright green lawn next to the Del Mar Powerhouse. Across the lawn is the ramp down to the beach. All in all, it's about 100 feet below L'Auberge, about a five minute walk. Once you hit the train tracks, everyone you see is in bare feet and bathing suits, many of them carrying surf boards.
And the beach at Del Mar is beautiful. It is clearly a locals beach. Tons of teenagers surfing and sun bathing. Tons of people jogging and walking their dogs. Older couples walking and women pushing their babies in strollers -- I've the seen the same set of people each evening that I've walked on the beach this week. Very clean sand. Real and very responsible lifeguards who actually stand up in their little houses with binoculars and watch the young kids surfing. Lots of space to spread out. Pelicans fly down the beach at bluff level, about 100 feet up. If you walk down towards Torrey Pines and La Jolla you can find yourself with hardly anybody around and nice clean beach and sea to go swimming in.
It's such a nice safe beach that you can leave your stuff in a little pile under the bluffs and go swim without worrying overly much about it. Everyone does it and so did I. I have gone swimming in the sea every day that I've been here. I go in and get thrown around by the modest sized waves for a while, which is "bracing" and makes my skin tingles, then I sit on a rock and dry off, then I walk back up to the Powerhouse Park and start my little climb up through the sandy ice plants to the back garden gate of L'Auberge, where I let myself in. I take a nice little nap in my cozy room, listening to the sea gulls and the trains down the bluffs, and then I "dress" for dinner down at the big white marble bar in the lobby with the unvarnished plank floor. Holly the bartender generally feeds me. She is a psychology student at a near by college and has only been working at L'Auberge for a month. She is fascinated by the stories I tell her about the history of the place (at least she says so anyway). If I could figure out a way to move into L'Auberge permanently, maybe she could be my friend.
But I am here to work after all. Tuesday I did a work shop for a bunch of shockingly naive biotech start up companies on how to stay out of prison, essentially. That was fun. The evaluations after the workshop said I was "interesting, extremely knowledgeable and engaging" with which I had to agree. I was DEEE-lite-ful. Today I went to visit a client that makes spinal implants. Their building is high atop a windblown mesa near Del Mar and is absolutely beautiful. Their devices are beautiful too. They could easily be little sculptures you could sell for millions of dollars in a gallery. While I was there, I saw the room where they teach doctors how to do spine surgery a certain way. They practice on cadavers. That have no legs. Just torsos. I saw one. It was gross. I asked lots of stupid questions. "Why is it that color? Is it supposed to smell? Is it still frozen? Isn't it hard to operate on when it's frozen? Will it melt? Does it have skin on it, I can't tell. Where are the legs?" Apparently they never get the legs. The legs go somewhere else. Knee implant companies maybe.
Tonight, though, my friend and colleague Lisa is coming to meet me at L'Auberge for drinks. We will have our drinks out besides the firepit in the sea breeze. A girlfriend of hers will join us. It will be lovely. And then tomorrow I'll fly home.
P.S. I learned that seagulls are very big. I smacked into one in the ocean. Humongous. Like hitting a deer in a car. Stupid bird.
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