Weekend Escape: Venice : Off the Boardwalk : Dad finds teenager’s choice for a getaway to be, like, really cool

Newport Beach, we thought, or maybe Santa Monica for a day or two. Either would be a nice quick getaway. But, as usual, we hadn’t counted on the kid.

The kid, our daughter, is 14 now and has more taboos than a houseful of Tongans--the people who gave us that nifty word. Newport isn’t cool, she announced, and neither is Santa Monica. Her choice: Venice.

Our response: Venice??!

I used to go through there a lot. When I was a teenager with a fourth-hand Alpha Romeo roadster, gas was 50 cents a gallon and you could blast up the coast along California 1 from Huntington Beach to Malibu and back without running into a single ticket-happy cop or a three-hour traffic jam.

But Venice these days? It’s not in the news every day, but when it is, it’s often for a gang-related shooting or some other tourist detraction.

Could we have fun? Could we relax? Would our daughter, who hates crowds, really have a good time on the boardwalk?

Well, yes.

We left on the Sunday before Labor Day, and to eliminate the boring shuttle up Interstate 405 from Orange County, we followed the route I used to take in the late ‘60s: up Pacific Coast Highway from Orange County through Long Beach with a detour around Palos Verdes Peninsula, through Portuguese Bend with its sweeping Pacific views and Palos Verdes Estates with its hidden haciendas and then down into Torrance, where we picked up California 1 again.

We spent the night at the historic Venice Beach House--originally summer home to the families of Venice founder Abbot Kinney and Daily News (of Los Angeles) founder Warren Wilson (they were related). We’d found the place in a handy oversize paperback called “Hidden Southern California,” and the innkeeper had sent us a brochure. But the Venice I was driving around . . . and around and around . . . wasn’t the same one I used to drive through on my way to Malibu.

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The inn’s address is 15 30th Ave., Venice, and the locater map on the brochure puts it half a block or so above the pier between Speedway and Pacific Avenue. That, in fact, is exactly where it is, but the one-way streets and the fact that Speedway these days is little more than an alley separating the backside of the beachfront shops and homes from the more modest residences of greater Venice, made it difficult to find.

We finally negotiated the turn onto Speedway from Washington Boulevard and, thanks to a sharp pair of 14-year-old eyes, spotted the small ceramic Venice Beach House nameplate fastened to a gate in a towering eugenia hedge that surrounds and screens the property. Thirtieth Avenue, it turned out, is a walkway, but another small sign directed us to the Beach House parking lot at the rear of the property on 29th Avenue, which isn’t a walkway.

We decided then and there that the cost of a room at the Venice Beach House is a real bargain. With the price of a day’s parking at any lot reasonably close to the beach pegged at $15, the free parking for guests makes the rates extremely reasonable.

The tariff on weekends runs from $95 for two people in a smallish bedroom that shares a bath with four other rooms to $165 for two for an ocean-view suite with a private bath and fireplace. At least five of the nine guest rooms were occupied when we were there, and innkeeper Leslie Smith said that in addition to vacationers from here and from France and Germany, the inn does a nice business with corporate types and “movie people and art gallery people,” Venice being popular with both groups.

Although the spacious house is 84 years old and has outlived most of the grandeur that once was Venice, the inn has been in business only since 1983. The Wilson family sold the home in the 1970s and it was doing duty as a boarding house when Phillip and Vivian Boesch bought it, renovated it and turned it into an inn.

In keeping with its historic roots, the place is furnished in period pieces (notwithstanding the cable-connected televisions in the rooms). The walls, upholstered in padded wool--one of them is plaid--to cut down on noise, are hung with photographs from the Wilson and Kinney families. Bruce, a gray short-haired cat, adds a homey touch as he curls up in the living room and visits with guests, but he actually belongs to a neighbor, Smith said. He just prefers the inn most days.

We were sharing a bathroom with other guests, but the facilities are spacious and we never had a conflict. One bathroom is outfitted with a pair of claw-footed antique tubs, a smaller one down the hall has a tile shower.

The next morning we breakfasted with fellow guests in the inn’s sunny parlor. The daily rate includes a hearty breakfast--coffee, tea, juice, fruit, homemade whole-wheat rosemary bread, coffee cake, hot oatmeal and eggs cooked to order. Some days, and we were there on one of them, Smith also prepares fresh waffles.

After checking in, we spent the day doing what most people who come to Venice do: strolling the two-mile Ocean Front Walk. There actually are two walkways now--one for bicyclists and roller-bladers, the other for pedestrians and dogs. And every other person there seemed to have a dog in tow, pit bulls handily outnumbering the other breeds.

We browsed the nearly 200 stalls that line the inland side of the walk and watched the street performers who line the ocean side.

My favorites were the jugglers (there were no chain saws, though!) and a close second for me and tops with my wife and daughter was a mime wearing a stretchy black body sack and doing an amazing routine in which he or she alternately stood stock still until literally becoming invisible to passersby and then turned into a hyperactive shadow bedeviling the unwary walker.

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We hit the retail stalls, where my wife is a looker, my daughter a buyer: Her purchases included 25 sticks of incense for $1, a Jim Morrisson T-shirt for a friend’s upcoming birthday and a silver toe ring that I think has yet to come off. (At least it’s a ring that slips on and didn’t require the services of one of the three or four body-piercing studios on the strand.)

Lunch on the patio of a boardwalk eatery--Coffee & Sympathy, across from the historic old St. Marks hotel--was quick and adequate: My wife and I split a Middle Eastern sampler, the kid ate part of a gigantic tostada.

That evening we took the innkeeper’s advice and tried the C&O; Trattoria, just around the corner on Washington Street. We ate in the restaurant’s outdoor dining area, next to a Spanish-style fountain and just in front of an amazing serve-yourself wine bar with legs borrowed from a store mannequin and an eye-popping paint job by local artist Joseph Summers. The food--Northern Italian, mostly pastas--was quite good and served in huge portions.

We were only in Venice for a day, so we spent our time on the board-less boardwalk, but the inn lends beach mats for sunbathers and the athletically adventurous may rent canoes nearby to take a waterborne tour of Venice’s remaining canals. And there’s always the weight equipment and basketball courts at Muscle Beach about a dozen blocks up the strand from the inn.

All in all, I’ve got to hand it to the kid: It was a pretty cool place to go.

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Budget for Three

Gas from Orange County: $4.10

Venice Beach House, 1 night: $118.80

Meals, snack, beverages: $68.20

FINAL TAB: $191.10

Venice Beach House, 15 30th Ave., Venice, CA 90291; tel. (310) 823-1966; fax (310) 823-1842 .