Calling All Families, a Resort Without Phones : Alisal Guest Ranch Near Santa Barbara Has Old-California Roots and a Hollywood Past

No telephones in the rooms.

During our week in July at the Alisal Guest Ranch near Solvang, an hour’s drive north of Santa Barbara, we must have heard five times, from five other families, of the luxury of not having telephones in the rooms, of simply not having to answer the phone.

Every family has its own requirements for a quality vacation. But I was surprised at the number of us who need to get away from the horn. “My husband’s addicted,” said one woman from the Bay Area who shared our table one night at a cookout. “That’s why we come here. An entire week away from the telephone!”

It was no time to tell her that I had spotted her husband earlier that afternoon, practically necking with the pay phone next to the ranch office.

Actually, there are other reasons to visit the Alisal. Golf nuts like it because, during most of the winter, the use of the ranch’s private golf course is included in the room rate. (The 10,000-acre ranch has built a second golf course, to open Oct. 19.) There is tennis and horseback riding led by real ranch hands. A private, 90-acre lake. Wine tours and kitschy shopping in Solvang.

The ranch is expensive, about $450 a night for four people, including gratuities and taxes. During holidays and all but the winter months, riding, golf and other activities cost extra--a 2 1/2-hour ride costs $40, a round of golf $45, a tennis court $10 an hour.

But the atmosphere is luxurious and hassle-free. Breakfast and dinner are included in the room rate, and are served in serene dining rooms. The service staff is experienced and abundant, and there is no tipping.

I hold myself out to be no kind of professional food critic, but I have to say the meals were not the best. Actually, one meal of grilled sirloin steak with smoked red pepper sauce was one of the best beef dishes I’ve ever had. But with only 60 bungalows, the Alisal is not a huge operation, and I saw no reason for the food to have been--on the whole--a tad institutional, about on the level of a cruise ship. For the money, there was no reason for chewy shrimp and canned blueberries.

Other than that, the Alisal promised, and delivered, an all-in-one-place vacation with something for each of us. The trick of a successful family vacation, it seems to me, is to enable parents and children to enjoy relaxed companionship while keeping out of each other’s hair. Our children are Jeanne, 11, and Evan, 4. As our days at the ranch went by (far too quickly), I understood why the ranch is popular with generations of families. It has learned over the years how to skillfully separate the kids from the adults.

To begin with the obvious, there is the pool. Nice pool. In outline it has two lobes, with the larger one for adults, deep and long enough for laps, and the smaller one a wading area about waist-high to a 4-year-old, with an underwater bench at its perimeter. A lifeguard sits next to the children’s area. There are two lifeguards at peak hours.

The pool accouterments are first-rate: the abundant towels, pool toys and comfortable deck furniture; the lawns around the pool, safe underfoot for playing soccer or whatever, since they were watered without the use of dangerous, in-ground sprinkler heads; the snack bar and the lounge, with its big-screen TV (no television in the guest rooms, either); the recreation room with its good-quality old Brunswig pool table. The set up makes it easy for an adult to bask in the heat of a sex-crazed novel, nearly forgetting that the kids are about.

Next to the rec room is the crafts center. It is staffed from about 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Jeanne spent a good deal of time there making hats and modeling clay. Evan would have no part of it. He took one whiff of the place and headed back for the pool. He knows day-care when he smells it, and gets plenty when he’s not on vacation.

But the ranch has devised more subtle strategies for drawing the kids away.

Late during the breakfast seating, when the adults have a hankering to linger at the table for an hour over coffee, outside on the lawn a counselor has set up a game of Frisbee golf. He has emptied a milk crate of Frisbees and numbered placards, and has staked the placards about in the lawn. As kids come out of the dining rooms, they may be enticed into a game of tossing the Frisbees at the placards--first one to touch them all in the minimum number of tosses wins. Meanwhile, one has been able to read the morning paper.

When we had been at the ranch a few days, I sensed that the layout of the place contributes subtly to parent-child harmony. A deep, dry creek bed separates all but a few of the residential buildings from Alisal Road, the two lanes of asphalt that border the ranch on the west. A pedestrian bridge connects the residential area with the office and the horse barns. Within the residential area, the buildings are separated by broad lawns and winding concrete walks, and ringed about with towering sycamores. The setting is that of a small, protected college campus.

In no time, our kids knew where everything was and felt comfortable walking about on their own. Evan would leave me at the pool and walk back to our room for a nap. I could watch him every step of the way. Jeanne stayed out till 10 o’clock one night to hear the storyteller hold forth in the library. She got home on her own and let herself in. From bed, we heard her settle down on her studio bed in the living room, and then we all went to sleep.

Yes, the ranch has a library building, with books and magazines and easy chairs. During the day it is off-limits to kids.

I give the impression that adults are firmly in charge here, and I think it’s true. There is a dress code for the dining rooms--jackets for men, dresses or pant suits for women, and for children, no jeans or T-shirts. Our kids didn’t mind; they hardly dined with us at all. They preferred the kids-only meals held elsewhere, the pizza party in the crafts room, the barbecue and “rodeo” out by the barns.

Was it too stuffy for us adults? I would say no, but for a short while it was touch and go. A few years ago we cruised on the QE2. That was too stuffy. There was silverware I didn’t recognize. I never found anyone to talk to. Here, I felt relaxed and comfortable, after the first day.

We had shown up kind of early. Check-in time was 4 p.m., but there we were at noon. My official excuse was that I thought it best to allow plenty of time to find the place. The truth: We were there to get our money’s worth. We were paying for this day and we were not going to miss a minute of it.

The concierge smiled and invited us to enjoy the pool while we waited. She told us where to change into our swimsuits. Trouble was, we were famished and dinner was not until 6. We had planned to lunch at poolside from our sack of crackers and fruit, but now, looking about the ranch headquarters, noticing a sign that forbade swimsuits in the office, marveling at the completeness of a uniform worn by one of the outdoor staff (he looked like a U.S. Forest Service ranger, minus the hat), I wondered if ourhauling out a grocery bag next to the pool would be quite acceptable.

The Alisal is among those rare remaining California institutions whose past rises from both foundations of the California image: the pastoral, rancho era of Mexican cowboys, and the glamour of Hollywood. As a cattle ranch, the Alisal still uses the original brand of Jose Raimundo Carrillo, who in 1804 was granted 13,500 acres for his service to the Mexican government. In 1946, the owners opened the place to summer guests, and in time its name became associated with the powerhouses of business, particularly show business. Clark Gable married Lady Sylvia Ashley here. Doris Day was a regular guest.

In short, while so much of California was new and bogus, the Alisal was old and authentic ranch. Real stars. Really exclusive.

As we made our way to a poolside table, I felt a little uneasy, even though we seemed to be among a crowd from our own San Fernando Valley. I had that feeling you get when you’ve just bought something on your credit card and the sales clerk is tapping a finger on the counter, waiting for the credit service to give its approval. You wonder, am I going to set off an alarm?

I know my wife, Jane, was also a bit put off, because we had just dug into our bag when she said, “Look at the list of rules over there.”

It was long. I jumped into the pool and swam across for a closer look. I was happy to see that it contained the usual stuff about diving and running and lifeguards on duty. It did have one rule I had not seen before: No radios on the pool deck, please.

We got to be very comfortable at the Alisal. Our quarters were delightful, quiet and full of Western touches such as a boot jack in the closet and bathroom tiles made to look like denim. Eating and sleeping like barnyard animals, without a care, our five days went by much too quickly. I have made a list of our favorite moments:

- The four of us in a rowboat on the lake. The kids are cracking up while Jane and I take turns trying to get the boat to go straight.

- Sitting with Jane after dinner, on a bench on the golf course’s 14th tee. Deer and other critters appear in the shadows by the fairway. Night falls. The florid sunset gives way to tinges of color on blue-gray clouds.

- Jeanne and I are riding near the lake. We try to count the sounds around us. We hear: a duck making a splash-landing about 200 yards away, the creak of saddles, the hiss of a horse’s wiry tail going after a fly, the clopff of hooves on the dust.

This being journalism, I must include the worst moment. We had just returned home, luggage piled on the living room floor, when the phone rang. It was the office asking if I could come fill in for someone who was ill. Ten minutes later I was speeding down the Santa Ana Freeway, wondering if this was any way to finish a vacation.

But I knew it was my own fault. I should never have answered that phone.