Olema

Over the years I have posted lots of pictures of Ocean Beach on this blog. It's very picture-worthy and only a half hour car ride from the bureau. Sometimes, however, it's good to get a different vantage point on the mighty Pacific. A couple of weeks ago Madame Le Chef and I rented a cottage for two nights in the tiny town of Olema. We were celebrating our anniversary. The cottage was a short walk from the celebrated (but badly named) restaurant Sir and Star. We had an excellent dinner there and didn't have to drive afterwords. Our cottage had a very interesting statue just outside in case we needed help finding our way home.

Earlier that day we had driven out to Drake's Beach. As transported Easterners it still amazes us that you can get to beautiful, sparsely populated beaches just by driving 90 minutes or two hours out of San Francisco.

On the drive back to Olema we stopped to visit a very small cemetery situated on a low hill in the middle of a cow pasture. It contained the graves of sailors who manned a life saving station in the later decades of the 19th Century. The waters off Point Reyes were very dangerous and there were many shipwrecks. All the sailors were immigrants.

If you stepped carefully over the cow pies, the low hill also provided an excellent opportunity to get an other perspective on Drake's Bay.

The previous night we had come upon this shrine while taking a post dinner walk around the town of Point Reyes Station, which is several times the size of Olema (no great feat) and a couple of miles away. We enjoyed the merging of the nautical and the sacred.