Saturday, March 6. With only two full days left before Steve returns on Monday, Phil and I each chose one excursion for today. Luckily they just happened to be only a few miles apart. I chose to visit Tor House in Carmel and he chose to take a look at the Lodge at Pebble Beach. So we had the yummy cherry cream cheese danish from Gayle's, a bagel and a hard-boiled egg with juice and coffee. I'm trying to watch my cholesterol, but hard-boiled eggs are such a neat and tidy breakfast, they're hard to resist. I throw away part of the yolk and use Spike for flavoring, but still feel a little guilty. I must say, I have not used any of my leisure time for exercise or other health-related concerns during this pretirement experiment. Phil's hypertension has not improved much either despite the lack of a commute. We have given time and thought to meditation, which we hope to continue once we return to Long Beach.
Before setting out for our destinations to the south, we took Dixie for a short walk. She wanted to go out again for a drive, but was a good sport about it when we put her back in the house. Phil called Katherine and Kevin to check on his mother's condition, but didn't connect with them.
The drive down to Monterey is becoming pretty familiar, but there always seems to be something new each time that catches my eye. This time I enjoyed the signs in a few fields telling the crop being grown with colorful 50s style characters holding produce. I always like to guess about the crops in the fields I pass, so I hope this is a "growing" trend. We stopped to stretch our legs in the Carmel shopping district and were bowled over by the prices at some of the galleries, not to mention home prices listed the realtors' windows. Phil has many memories of visiting here, but for me it is always a freakish place where people have all agreed to pay too much for everything.
We had a little trouble finding Tor House. After having read about it and heard it mentioned from time to time, I was surprised to discover the old stone cottage and rustic tower built by poet Robinson Jeffers for his wife and family is not on some remote hill overlooking the sea. It's smack dab in the middle of the million dollar plus homes we'd been reading about in the Carmel realtors' windows. There's even one imposing plate glass conglomeration that looks right down into the rose garden. We hadn't made a reservation but the tour guide very nicely made an exception for us and we didn't have long to wait before the tour began.
The design of Tor House is every bit as romantic and eccentric as you'd expect something built by a poet to be. Actually, Una Jeffers, Robinson's wife, seemed to have as much to do with the planning as he did. Their mascots, the hawk and the unicorn, appear all over the house, which is handbuilt of native stone rolled right up from the rocky shore and low-ceilinged because it was heated only by fireplaces until the 40s. Our tour guide had wonderful anecdotes to share, like when Una would thump the ceiling with a broom handle when she heard Robinson pacing too much, and she even read several poems that related to specific parts of the house. I found it inspiring that the poet would write every morning and then put in several hours each day on building the house. Sort of like the Winchester house, he kept adding on rooms and additions.
The most spectacular part of the place is a freestanding tower he built with an outside stairway and a "secret passageway" so narrow you have to go in shoulder first. The three story structure offers several striking views of the roaring surf and rocky coastline from Pebble Beach all the way to Point Lobos. Standing on top in the salt air breeze with pelicans soaring by only a few feet above our heads gave a little hint of how remote the setting must have been when the Jefferses first began to build their house there. It was by far the most memorable tour of a historic home I have taken in a long time.
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