While growing up I spent many weekends and vacations on the Monterey Peninsula in California. While in High School I went SCUBA diving in the kelp forests off the coast every chance I got. There is something about the granite coastline of this area that calls to me. The rocky coast and redwoods of Big Sur are particularly magical.
Big Sur is a special area for my wife, Linda, as well. The hills in Big Sur rise steeply from the ocean, leaving a strip of land along the coast where Highway 1 runs. The ecology is precious and fragile. Water can be scarce. There are only a handful of places to stay. A few camp grounds, a few motels, and two upscale resorts: the Ventana Inn and The Post Ranch Inn.
Linda and I started staying at Ventana years ago during the winter when the rates were lower. Over the years, however, Ventana kept increasing their rates so that even the winter prices became difficult to afford. So we started looking for private homes we could rent for a week or more.
One wet week in February we rented the house shown below:
The Hawley House is at 1200 feeet above sea level (For the web page click here). It is a "hippie"-style redwood dome, built around 1975. The house sits on ten acres of land, on a steep hillside. Access is via a gated US Forest Service road that runs behind the Ventana Inn. The house has the best view I think I will ever see in this lifetime. The two photos below are of the hills and of the ocean, from a hill above the house.
In the winter rain can lash the Big Sur coast and in the summer it can be shrouded in fog. But water is still a scarce resource and redwood hollows are interspersed with almost desert areas. Big Sur is dry and there are yucca plants, which one would usually expect in the sub-desert. Here is a blooming yucca, which is a rare sight.
Spending a wet February week at the Hawley House was such a magical experience that we decided to save up our pennies and rent it for two weeks over the coming summer. If it was great in the winter, we thought, it would be even better when there were not days of continuous driving rain and wind.
Bilbo Baggins notes that Adventures are messy things. Adventures don't follow your original plan. Unfortunately, our second stay at the Hawley House during the summer was an Adventure.
Aside from the view, the first thing that we noticed when we arrived in July was that there were numerous mouse traps scattered throughout the house: in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bedrooms, and in the closets. Linda was horrified to find one on the nightstand right next to the bed. The house is over twenty-five years old and is full of areas where mice and rats can crawl. It is also located in the Ventana National Forest, an area full of wildlife. The problem is that some of the local wildlife had moved in with the humans: there was an (undisclosed) rodent problem. Soon after we arrived we went down to the basement to do a load of wash. There we found a huge, dead rat, caught in a large rat trap, laying on the cement floor.
While we were warned about common Big Sur issues like power outages and water usage, there was no mention of the fact that we would be sharing the house with various rodents, although the owners certainly knew about this long-standing problem. One possibility is that the owners felt that disclosing this problem would seriously reduce the number of people willing to pay the substantial weekly rate to share a house with rodents. Even with the breathtaking view, the truth is that rodents can put a damper on an otherwise romantic (and extremely expensive) vacation.
When we mentioned the rodent problem to the caretakers, and later to the owners, they said, "What do you expect?! You're living in the forest." Perhaps. But I live in a rural area now, and we don't have rats and mice in-or-even-near our house.
One night, around 2:30AM, Linda was awoken by a "snap" and a scrabbling sound. This was the sound of a mouse dying in a trap. We could not even find the dead mouse until we the day we left. We only stayed nine days, rather than the fourteen we had paid for. The fear of encountering a mouse, live or dead - and in the dark - became too much for Linda. When we later suggested to one of the owners that she refund a portion of our money, since we left early as we were never given prior notice of the rodent infestation, she refused. This left us with little recourse but legal action against an owner/lawyer with substantial local ties. Seemed pretty futile...so they kept the money.
