An expansive live oak clings to the grassy hill that slopes west for a few yards before diving to the ocean below. Ridgelines stack to the south. And from the tree, a steller's jay, sporting nature's sleekest electric blue, executes a series of daring dives, inching ever closer to our fries.
Sunset draws a muted applause from the cocktailers, and we retreat to Nepenthe's upper patio, where a recessed stone, half-moon bench faces a huge fire pit. I could sit here all night, and it is becoming clear that, moldy tents notwithstanding, the hardest thing about camping in Big Sur is actually roughing it.
So we don't even try. Rob leads us down the road to Deetjen's Big Sur Inn, an earthy little place lifted straight from the shire, with dark wood and tilted floors. We arrive at 8:43 for our 8:30 dinner reservation.
"Oh my," says the hostess, worriedly. "He [the chef] just told me he was cutting off dinners." She hurries to the back while I contemplate the nutritional gap between ahi tuna and freeze-dried camp food.
But she returns smiling and leads us to our table, which sits directly beneath a portrait of the inn's namesake, Helmuth Deetjen, a Norwegian fugitive who came to Big Sur in the 1930s with a wife he had met in Carmel.
The two began housing travelers from the outset, with a reputed warmth that seems to belie the image of the man hovering over us. He glares down in a black beret, clutching a pipe, with one eyebrow arched: "You are late. Only bread for you!"
But even he seems to soften up when the baby organic green salad, pork tenderloins with Bing cherries and seared tuna hit the table, and I think I detect a faint Scandinavian smile when one of the inn's house cats wanders through the dining room. (Of course, Herr Deetjen might be grinning at the swelling till: Dinner for three, with wine, runs us around $180.)
Two hours later we crawl into the new tent, beneath the redwoods and mere feet from a rushing creek, and slide into a sleep that no hotel bed could top.
Follow That Trail
"I want to find this," Rob says the next morning, pointing to a picture in his guidebook. It's a black-and-white shot of a trail slithering through wildflowers with an unobstructed view of the coastline hundreds of feet below.
In a normal vacation world, the dream shot would no longer exist, or would be too crowded or too far away or otherwise unattainable right now. But in Big Sur, it is just down the road.
The Vicente Flat Trail rises steadily above Highway 1. Within minutes we are stopping to click off panorama shots and, by the time we reach the day-hike apex of 2,000 feet, I have peeled through an entire roll of film. A cool breeze tempers the sun, the mountains breathe gently, the earth brings forth a rich, varied garden of . . . wait a sec! That's poison oak. And so is that, and that, and . . . uh oh.
Yes, even paradise has its price, and we are flirting with the itchiest of payouts. I had seen the wicked plant on prior hikes, but here it runs wild, blending in with the pretty, innocent flowers like an identity thief waiting for us to wander into his trap. (Alas, despite our vigilance, my wife and I would carry an irritating reminder of the trip for two weeks after arriving home.)
