Elizabeth Weil
The author's husband and daughters on the Coastal Trail.
It was not a good sign: the need to explain to our children that the holiday we'd planned, 15 miles from our Northern California home, was a legitimate vacation and that people from across the country, maybe even the world, would fly thousands of miles for the pleasure. We — the adults — were pretty sure hiking inn-to-inn through lovely Marin County qualified as a real vacation. But our children were unconvinced.
Their friends had flown to Hawaii. Or Egypt, followed by Paris. We told our daughters, ages 8 and 10, to each put a couple of changes of underwear, a clean shirt, a fleece jacket, a toothbrush and a book in a backpack. Then we threw our stuff in our Subaru, drove north across the Golden Gate Bridge, parked in a casual lot just off Highway 101 in Sausalito and headed up a trail.
We travel for beauty, for the exotic, to bond with our loved ones out of context, exhumed from the quicksand of daily life and parted from our smartphones. Staycations, in my opinion, are bunk — or, more generously, it takes a stronger person than I am to find the beautiful and the exotic, and lose the smartphone, in one's own home.
But this trip was different; that was the party line. My husband, Dan, and I were not flaking on our parental duty to show our children the world. We were taking them on an enriching adventure, just one that happened to be nearby.
The plan, Day 1: Hike eight miles on trails from the sparkly tourist town of Sausalito up and over the Marin Headlands to the rugged cove of Muir Beach. Day 2: Walk 10 miles on trails from Muir Beach to Stinson Beach, which is sort of the Hamptons of Northern California. Then hike two more miles down the sand and swim (yes, swim!) across the lagoon mouth to gorgeous-but-surly Bolinas. Day 3: Surf and loaf around Bolinas, hoping to avoid the great white sharks that congregate there. Then return to Sausalito via bus and resume being resident Californians once reunited with our car.
The Marin Headlands are unspeakably beautiful — God's country for investment bankers and hippies who made smart real-estate moves. Being locals, we had day-tripped there dozens of times. But that first day, just an hour up the dusty single-track road, the rolling hills looked different. Yes, still emerald green and affording knockout views. But without the car and the knowledge that we'd soon be back in it, the same terrain we'd walked on many times looked wilder; less like a park, more like a fantasy wilderness.
Also, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say, we felt the Headlands were ours. Everybody else was just toe-touching for a few hours. By evening they'd be home, emptying the dishwasher and watching Netflix. Us? We'd moved in for a long weekend. Red-tailed hawks greeted us, circling. Poppies, irises and monkey flowers bloomed at our feet.
Still, wherever you are, hiking with children is a high-stakes game. To win, you need candy or humor, and probably both. That first afternoon we stumbled on a comedy gold mine: the bro hug. A bro hug, for the uninitiated, is a handshake that flows into a shoulder-first, backslapping embrace.
My 8-year-old daughter, Audrey, claimed to have bro hugged me by mistake after I offered her some sunscreen. This was just 10 minutes after she'd given her father a big I-love-you-Daddy embrace to thank him for a piece of chocolate, so I'm not sure I believe her. No matter. The bro hug became our trip's leitmotif, a real gift. We bro-hugged our way up and over Wolf Ridge and along the Coastal Trail.
Perhaps worn down toward the end of our eight-mile day, this frivolity gave way to lingering status anxiety. Dan and I began to wonder if we should have become lawyers instead of writers, allowing us to jet the family off to tropical paradises. As we descended the rugged slope toward Muir Beach, we, along with the girls, indulged in a collective fantasy that we were slipping down the water slide into the Fairmont Kea Lani Maui pool.
As anybody who's been to one of those resorts can tell you, you can travel half way across the planet and learn nothing besides the pool bartender's name — or you can travel 500 yards and have your mind blown. Entering the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, the Zen Buddhist practice center where we spent our first night, we were stunned into silence.
Our rooms were clean and simple. The grounds were breathtaking. And the place was zazen quiet. For dinner, we ate a delicious tagine in a room filled with silent, bald, black-robed monks. (The dozen other guests there for a workshop, "Transforming Depression and Anxiety: A Path of Skillful Compassion," didn't lighten the mood much.) In the morning, after breakfast, Hannah, our older daughter, darted for the front gate. Audrey followed, rapping, "Om in the house with the freaky freaky quiet people."
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