There’s an
ancient joke about the newlyweds who show up at a motel on their wedding night
and ask for a room, but are told that the only one left is the honeymoon suite.
Ecstatic, they take it, and as they’re checking out the following morning, the
bride asks the motel owner what makes the honeymoon suite different from the
other rooms.
Scratching
his head, he replies, “Well, it’s the only one where the TV set is broken.”
Half a
century ago, that was the extent of the unplugged world. Today there are so
many things you have to get rid of to get to that state that it seems almost
impossible. Nevertheless, there are a handful of places where one can make the
attempt, and over the first weekend in January, Linda and I went up to Jenner,
on the rugged coast north of San Francisco, to visit one of them: River’s End
inn and restaurant.
The Pay Phone Was Necessary
Jenner is a
beautiful town of a little more than a hundred people, located at the mouth of
the Russian River. River’s End advertises the unplugged experience, and whether
it’s intentional or they’re just too cheap to put in the equipment, it’s no
joke. We stayed in one of the cabins, which was clean, spacious, well heated
and well furnished.
But it
wasn’t well connected. There was no phone, no TV, no wi-fi, and no 3-G cell
phone reception — at least for our carrier. There was an honest to God pay
phone in the parking lot by the restaurant, and it was by no means decorative.
If you needed to make a restaurant reservation, you either used that pay phone
or drove 13 miles to the nearest town where you could get a signal on the
phone.
On the
other hand, who needs a TV when you can look out your window at a to-die-for
view of the river emptying into the ocean. In this year of drought in
California, we drew three straight sunny days, and the sunsets, taking place
directly in our view path, were breathtaking.
Busman’s Holiday
Unfortunately,
Linda had a bit of work to do for a class she teaches, so she spent a couple of
afternoons on that. Being a mystery writer, I read a couple of short novels in
the genre, Andrea Camilleri’s The Track
of Sand and John Dickson Carr’s Poison
in Jest.
Still, I
found myself missing the cell phone and Internet after a while. I am far from
being a compulsive user; in fact my usage is almost entirely purpose-driven. I
go to the web to look up specific information, or to use email, which is the
lifeline of my business. All I wanted was to do a quick check once during the
day to make sure I wasn’t missing anything really big, which I wasn’t. But it
was a lot of effort to get to a place where I could have the five minutes of
time online that I needed.
And while
it was nice to know that I wasn’t going to be interrupted by an annoying phone
call, it was also annoying not to be able to call our son, Nick, who had just
reported to his new posting with the Army at Fort Campbell. Saturday night we
drove around the nearby town of Guerneville, looking for a place with a strong
enough signal to make that call. We finally found it in the Safeway parking
lot.
Despite the
bother, I’d do it again, only plan a little better and head into it knowing
what to expect. Three days of serenity is worth a bit of inconvenience.
