Urban walkabout from Santa Rosa to San Francisco
On a Sunday morning last summer Tara Harvey, her husband Geza Kadar and her sister Stefan Harvey put on backpacks, stepped out from their front door in Montecito Heights and set out on a walk.
They headed down Montecito Avenue to the old McDonald Avenue neighborhood before turning onto Fourth Street toward downtown Santa Rosa, where they returned books to the library and mailed letters at the post office. Then they took a stroll through the Luther Burbank Gardens before stopping at the Parkside Cafe for breakfast.
They had walked three miles and were feeling good.
But their walk didn’t end there. The three foot travelers, all in their 60s, continued down Petaluma Hill Road, stopped at the Green Music Center for a picnic, gorged on strawberries and peach from a roadside fruit stand nearby where they had a long chat with the growers and kept walking - all the way to San Francisco.
Their pilgrimage would take them over nearly 85 miles of roads and paths, through cities, tiny towns and wilderness trails, ending five days later with a march across The Golden Gate Bridge and a celebratory meal at Liverpool Lil’s near The Presidio.
Not quite a hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, it was more like an urban-to-rural-to-urban walkabout, one that requires logistical advance work but relatively little money. And the reward was seeing the North Bay roads they had traversed many times before, not through a car window at 50 or 60 miles an hour, but close to the ground, one step at a time.
“It changes your perspective on the areas we take for granted, that we pass by all the time,” said Kadar, a retired attorney who specialized in health care and health care reform.
“I definitely got that feeling when walking from Tamalpais to San Francisco on the ridge above Sausalito. We had no idea there was wilderness beyond that line you see from the car.
“And it is all the way from the coast. From up there you don’t even see Sausalito. And all of a sudden you come to a point and there is the Golden Gate and the beautiful bay and Cavallo Point.“
Different experience
Tara, a retired Chief Deputy County Counsel for the County of Sonoma, said that walking is a completely different experience. Petaluma Hill Road, she said, seemed much prettier, even on a blazing hot day, and Petaluma’s historic D Street was so much more interesting on foot.
“We’ve driven that almost 100 times” she said.
“But we were stopping and looking at people’s gardens and the details on the houses.”
The Harvey sisters were inspired to take a long walk close to home after completing a 35-day, 500-mile trek on El Camino de Santiago, a route followed by medieval pilgrims across the north of Spain. But El Camino is busy with people from all over the world making the same walk. And there are ample places to eat, get water and spend the night along the way.
Popular in Australia
Urban walkabouts have become a popular thing in Australia, where aborigines first adopted the practice by sending young males into the wilderness as a rite of passage.
Locally, UC-Berkeley instructor Tom Courtney and his daughter Emily launched a series of books and a website, Walkabout Northern California, with sample routes for hiking through public lands from inn to inn with just a daypack. But Kadar and the Harvey sisters could find no blazed trail from Santa Rosa to San Francisco.
They at first assumed they could patch together a route that would take them through parks and open-space lands.
But after poring over maps, including the route for the Tour of California bike race, and consulting friends and Marin County farmers, they discovered there were too many gaps between public lands.
They also had to carefully calculate how many miles they could cover in a day and where to stay and where to eat.
Their first night was spent at the Motel 6 in Petaluma, where their long anticipated reward of a dinner and drink at Lagunitas Brewery evaporated.
“That was going to be our treat. But they were having their World’s Fair of Beer that day and there were 5,000 people there,” Kadar said.
Help from friends
They had to rely on a patchwork of friends and good Samaritans. Staff at the little Union Elementary School outside Petaluma let them refill their water bottles.
Because there were no places to stay between Petaluma and Olema or Point Reyes Station, the innkeeper at the Point Reyes Seashore Lodge generously offered to leave his car for the travelers at the Marin French Cheese Factory so they could drive themselves to the Lodge.
Saying he admired what they were doing and wanted to support them, he then let them use his car to drive back to the Cheese Factory the next morning and resume their trek on foot toward Olema.
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