Bodega Bay – Blink and it’s Gone
One afternoon W needs to rest, so I take a walk down our hotel’s street. Bodega Avenue is sidewalk free and pot holed, lined with little bungalows with bright-colored but peeling paint and cheerful geraniums in containers. At the end of the road are three redwood posts blocking access to what is beyond. I step through – into another world.
Sidewalks. Gutters. New pavement. A green space to my left with a fountain burbling. And houses, all painted in placid neutral shades with gleaming white trim. At least half of the houses have the driveway blocked with big red fenders – to keep squatters out? Some of the houses are large, two stories with a deck looking out to the harbor. Some, to my surprise, are small attached cottages no bigger than our suite at the Harbor Bay Inn. A few seem inhabited; in one, a BBQ party is happening on the deck. It seems I’ve been transported to Suburbia, but no, it is the Harbor View development at Bodega Bay.

I go out the flag-bedecked front entrance to the development and make my perilous way along the sidewalk free, shoulder-free Highway 1.
W is still resting, and the fog has lifted completely, so I take the car down to Duran County Park, the long finger that curls across the south end of Bodaga Bay. There’s an entrance fee of $7, which takes my last folding money. I drive past a Bird Walk, a Day Use area, several Reservations Only campgrounds filled with tents and trailers, a Visitors Center, and a Coast Guard station, all the way to the tip of the finger, site of a Day Use parking lot and a fine view of the headlands we had been on in the morning.
The Visitor’s Center is closed, but there is an information sign posted nearby explaining what you can see from this point: Jetty, the coast guard station, Mt.Tamalpais in the distance on a clear day, Point Reyes in the near distance, and then to the east “South Harbor Bay” and “North Harbor Bay”. These are clearly seen and they are developments, which from this distance look very much like Harbor View. They encrust the hillsides south of Bodega Bay like barnacles. Who lives in these developments. Are they all second homes? How long will it be before their residents demand a Safeway instead of Diekmann’s Bay Store or the Pelican Point Grocery? How much longer than that before a Costco sets up in Valley Ford?
Better visit Bodega Bay quickly. Blink and it’s gone.
















































