Getaways among friends
Published: Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 11:10 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 11:10 a.m.
Wanda Burzycki and her book club have been gathering for long weekend getaways for 12 years at Sea Ranch, creating what the Healdsburg woman calls “the perfect vacation for ourselves.”
For a few days they trade husbands, children and work for “walks along the golden bluffs, gourmet meals, cocktail hours from lunch to midnight and uninterrupted stints of reading.”
Lyndi Brown and the women she calls her Dharma Sisters also head out yearly, often to Sea Ranch, for the same guilt-free pleasures, although they add in yoga and meditation. They call themselves the Dharma Sisters because they’re all “California-Buddhist-Christian rooted,” said Brown of Penngrove.
These friends met when they were working with Home Hospice and now many for work for Kaiser Permanente’s mental health services in Santa Rosa. The youngest in the group is 50, the oldest in their 60s. “We don’t stay up all that late,” said Brown.
Not a new concept, but definitely on the upswing, girlfriend getaways are as common as two women finding a place to hang and talk.
In the classic Clare Boothe Luce play “The Women,” which was turned into a 1939 movie, New York friends head off to a dude ranch in Nevada to await their divorce. In the new movie “Bonneville,” Jessica Lange, Joan Allen and Kathy Bates share a convertible on a road trip from Pocatello, Idaho, to Santa Barbara.
American women have become a driving force in the travel industry, according to National Geographic, spending some $125 billion on travel every year. And much of the time they’re doing it with their girlfriends.
Tiburon-based travel writer Marybeth Bond found enough to say about girlfriend trips for an entire book, “50 Best Girlfriends Getaways in North America,” published in 2007 by National Geographic Books. She followed it up this month with an international version, “Best Girlfriend Getaways Worldwide.”
Women travel together to celebrate milestones and to reunite with scattered friends, said Bond, but beyond that there’s not usually a detailed agenda.
Women-only trips often become a combo pajama party, book club, pot luck and movie marathon with maybe some exercise, shopping and amateur therapy thrown in.
“You don’t really need a reason. You just want to get together,” said Bond. “For retail therapy or a birthday blowout. To be listened to, to cry and not feel like whining, to laugh until your sides ache.”
There’s also the “responsibility-free factor.” Going to a hotel or rented house with friends means no one is in charge.
“No one has to be the hostess,” said Bond, “or worry about making the husband or boyfriend happy.”
Like the 12 girlfriends from Petaluma who took off for Italy in 2006 to party, make friends with locals, eat and have a “very cute” Venetian bartender create a drink in their honor.
It took months of planning, said Barbara Darling, who works for the St. Joseph Health System, but it was so successful they’re now organizing a trip to Greece.
The best thing about traveling with women, said Darling, is “that they take care of themselves, with no looking after someone else.”
For Elisa Baker, getting together with her pals “is like being 12 years old again and having a slumber party with my best friends.”
For almost 20 years her friends, who met working at Ursuline High School, have practiced “reckless abandon” one long weekend a year at a rented house at Bodega Bay, Dillon Beach or Fort Bragg.
The main requirement, she said, is a hot tub.
“We know each other so well,” said Baker, who now works for Canine Companions for Independence. “We know who snores, who needs a king size bed to themselves, who drinks Ovaltine.”
Bond said women-only trips are different than men traveling together. Men’s getaways usually focus on an activity, like fishing, hunting and other sports, she said.
A Phoenix hotel, luring men to spring training, for example, promises a “man-cation” with cigars, bourbon and rounds of golf.
“For women it’s all about listening, nurturing, having fun. There’s no competition,” said Bond. “Guy trips are usually focused around sports.”
That stereotype doesn’t hold for a group of Glen Ellen guys who regularly jog together but occasionally expand their time outs for wilderness backpacking trips. This year, Ed Davis’ group will repeat a favorite hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. The group has also traveled together to Costa Azul north of Puerto Vallarta to surf, kayak or hike.
Two years ago Davis and Leigh Hall went to Zimbabwe, where Hall’s son Ben was volunteering at a hospital.
Davis has been traveling with friends “since those first hitch-hiking freight-hopping trips in the early 1970s, so it has always just seemed natural to me.”
Bond, who recently traveled to Nepal with a daughter and a woman neighbor, said when women travel together, “We come back recharged, rejuvenated and recommitted to our careers, our lives, our marriages, our husband.” Speaking of which, she adds, “we might even miss him a little.”
Even during a belt-tightening year, Bond said women will still get away, and on the cheap if necessary.
“Women are savvy shoppers,” said Bond, often preferring a self-styled trip to an upscale resort package that lures women with “cosmo drinks and spa treatments.”
You don’t have to go any farther than home if you’re willing to play hostess. Paula Donahue invited her Massachusetts friends — they’ve known each other since grade school — to stay at her Sebastopol home when her husband and children left on a separate trip.
Donahue showed off the local amenities, scheduling facials at Osmosis in Freestone, pedicures in Sebastopol and haircuts in Santa Rosa. They had coffee at a bakery in Freestone, went to lunch in Occidental, spent a day at the beach at Salmon Creek and dinner at the Tides in Bodega Bay. Then they moved on to San Francisco.
Barbara Weisman of Santa Rosa first hooked up with her travel buddies when they worked with the Marin County schools. They call themselves “The Phases,” she said, “because of all the different phases we’ve gone through together — weddings, childbirth, divorce, menopause, adolescent children, children in college, grandchildren, retirement.”
In the early years they camped at Lake Tahoe, then moved their getaway to Stinson Beach and now they favor Bodega Bay.
Weisman said her husband is fine with her short escapes. He uses the time “to get sushi and rent all the action movies I would hate.”
Meanwhile, Catalina is the destination this summer for a bunch of women in their 70s, organized by Jackie Calinsky of Kelseyville. The women went to Fullerton High School together and are scattered around California and Arizona.
“We’ll keep our tradition as long as our bodies hold out,” Calinsky said. “We have such a good time for a bunch of old broads” — as long as they stick to their promise to never discuss politics.
You can reach Staff Writer Susan Swartz at 521-5284 or susan.swartz@pressdemocrat.com.
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