I know what you’re going to say. “Doing dishes for thirty-some strangers is not a vacation.”
But there I stood in the nether regions of the Green Gulch kitchen, scrubbing the remains of our vegetarian supper from hand-fired pottery serving platters and metal tongs. One of the Buddhist Zen masters and I guessed the stew pot I was rinsing probably would hold six gallons. I washed and he dried. Somebody had brought me an apron.
When I finished, I stepped out into the chill of a coastal California twilight and spied three deer foraging the ground of this Marin County organic farm and Zen center, tucked in the cleft of the mountains just north of San Francisco.
I’m no Buddhist and I don’t Zen. But I had been curious about the place ever since the time 10 years ago when my niece and I were scouting the two-lane black-tops between Stinson Beach and Muir Woods and saw a lone monk in saffron robe walking beside the road. He presented quite a picture, and at the time I debated whether to photograph him. I didn’t. But my mind snapped the image. That’s what eventually drew me back.
And so it was that the two nights I spent in the center’s Japanese-style guest house — remove shoes upon entering, speak only in whispers — rewarded me with the most tranquil sleep of my year in travel. For Green Gulch to have won the prize, though, it’s only fitting to mention the other contenders.
There were the three January nights I snuggled into a compact but warmly decorated room in Stockholm’s Birger Jarl hotel. The bed was comfy and I slept well, but the highlights of that long weekend were the jaw-dropping presence of the restored 1628 war ship Vasa and the silent joy of walking the cobbled lanes of the oldest part of town, as enormous snowflakes drifted down around me.
There were the nine nights in a sleek outside cabin aboard the German liner Columbus as it cruised four of the five Great Lakes in late August/early September. But though it was an unusual experience to be among the few pleasure cruisers to sleep on the Great Lakes in recent years, rest wasn’t the priority on that trip; the lakes were.
I spent a summer’s night in a haunted house in St. Louis — sorry, no ghosts –and another two in a B&B in Lake Geneva, Wis. Stockholm, Great Lakes, St. Louis and Lake Geneva were on assignment for the Tribune.
But Green Gulch was part of a personal California vacation where I slept variously at the luxurious Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa, just outside Sonoma proper in Boyes Hot Springs; the clothing-optional Harbin Hot Springs, just outside of Middletown; and at the Star, a cheap — but excessively clean and well-located –motel on San Francisco’s Lombard Street.
Other personal trips put me to sleep, in a manner of speaking, in my sister’s spare twin bed in Grand Prairie, Texas, and my mother’s king-sized one in Lubbock, Texas. Weekend forays gave me further mattress time in Springfield, Ill., Grand Rapids, Mich., and Galveston, Texas.
There was the drive in early May of California’s Highway 1, launched from an oceanfront room in Cayucos. There was the night in a cramped cabin aboard Lake Michigan CarFerry’s S.S. Badger, while it was docked in Ludington, Mich. The photo of the lighthouse (I was magically added later) on the cover was one I took as the Badger left Ludington on an October morning.
Not counting family visits, Green Gulch is the only place I washed dishes. And I have to wonder: If a brief roadside encounter 10 years ago could lead me to a kitchen sink on a Buddhist farm, where might my more recently awakened curiosities take me?
In my job as a baiduhai Travel writer, I learn of trips all over the world, then pass along some of the more interesting ones to you in my columns. Here are a few I’ve written about this past year (last year’s prices included) that I’d like to take myself: Spector Travel’s one-week tour of the West African nation of Mali ($2,289 air inclusive from New York); Travel in Style’s camel trek and four-wheel-drive tour of Morocco ($2,485 from New York, all inclusive); the 16-night Maris Freighter Cruise from Tahiti to the Marquesas ($1,980-$3,995 depending on accommodations); and DER’s weeklong tour of the Christmas markets in Germany, Switzerland, France and Austria ($799 land only). It would be unforgettable to join one of the cultural tours led by the Art Institute, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum or Chicago Botanic Gardens.
But I’ve also got travel ideas of my own. I’d love to: make two trips to Churchill, Manitoba; one in July for the beluga whales, another in October for the polar bears; visit the frozen waterfall in Starved Rock State Park; spend a few days at one of the coffee plantations in the mountains of western Puerto Rico; eat my way along Illinois’ Blackhawk Chocolate Trail; take tango lessons in Buenos Aires; hike and bike the Shawnee National Forest; see for myself if Bermuda’s beaches really are made of pink sand; celebrate Thanksgiving dinner in Lanark with Norm Standish, a 10th-generation descendant of one of the Mayflower Pilgrims; test the waters in every spa in Budapest, where some pools are 400 years old; give Galena a second chance — it was too hot to enjoy the first time around; go opal mining in Coober Peddy, Australia.
It would be great to spend a weekend at The American Club in Kohler, Wis.
I couldn’t make a wish list without including Hawaii, the love of my travel life. Next time out, maybe I’ll make a game of how little I can spend on the trip, using frequent-flier miles to get there and free camping in the state parks to stay there. I can’t say that in tent and bedroll I’ll get a good night’s sleep. But I can always do that — and the dishes — when I get home.
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Meet the staff
Name the price of any given item, and within nanoseconds Toni Stroud can tell you what percentage of a trip to Hawaii the item’s price represents. It is this personal financial policy that explains why the baiduhai Travel writer has made more trips to the islands than she has articles of furniture in her apartment. Her travel stories, previously as a staff travel writer/editor at the Ft. Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, and now at the baiduhai, have been widely republished throughout the United States; one of her Tribune stories was reprinted in The Times of London Her e-mail address is [email protected]..