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.

Day Three found them at the Nicasio Reservoir and Platform Bridge to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, fighting winds as they headed west.

They picked up a ride to Inverness at Point Reyes Station, where a friend took them home for a meal and hot showers. On Day Five they hit the Dipsea Trail toward Mill Valley, lunched in Muir Woods, and finally bedded down after 11 miles at a friend’s house in Tiburon.

Their final day found them walking a waterside trail from Mill Valley to Sausalito.

“The things you run across that are totally unexpected are really cool,” Kadar said.

“It seemed like every day had a really neat surprise of one sort or another. For me, one of the best surprises was walking along the little trail through Sausalito and seeing a white tent building. It turned out a non-profit foundation is building from scratch a tall masted ship. It was absolutely amazing.”

Blisters, hills

Each experienced their own moments of trial. For Kadar it was the hot walk along Petaluma Hill Road, nursing a blister from his lightweight running shoes.

“The hardest day for me was coming up out of Petaluma. I thought I would never get to the top of that hill,” said Stefan, an experienced hiker and cyclist from Davis, who recently retired after 14 years as assistant director for The California Center for Public Health Advocacy.

Tara remembers with a shiver an 18-mile trek from Olema to Stinson Beach on a foggy day with the trees dripping like rain onto them.

After grilled cheese sandwiches and beer in the funky bar at the Presidio Yacht Club, with its incredible views of the Golden Gate, they headed to the bridge. It was a “Chariot’s of Fire” moment when their son drove past them on the Golden Gate Bridge in the opposite direction, honking and waving.

They were so invigorated by the success of their walkabout, they followed it up in September with a walk from the top of Mount Diablo to the Port of Oakland, an easier trip thanks to a 30-mile asphalt greenway from Danville to Walnut Creek and Lafayette to Orinda.

They’re now contemplating their next hike, possibly through The Peninsula. There were lessons they learned along the way, like the importance of wearing sturdy hiking boots.

Stefan said she was surprised and heartened by the kindness of others who made it possible, like the innkeeper at Olema who loaned his car.

The reward was the fun of new discoveries in what seemed like familiar turf, and the sense of accomplishment.

“I’m always amazed at how much you can accomplish one step at a time,” Kadar said.

“We could look way off in the distance and see this impressive-looking hill and think, ‘Oh my god. I don’t know how I’m going to do that.

“But you keep plodding along and pretty soon you get on top of it and the view is spectacular.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.