Weekend Escape: Marin County : A walk in the woods, a meal, a massage--it’s a wonderful life

My indelible memory of Mill Valley, the storied bedroom-community-cum-lifestyle-statement 12 miles north of San Francisco, is of a blazing blue Monday near the end of the disco era, when a comedian friend took me on his rounds arm-twisting club owners to book his act. The Bay Area that day glistened with flawless postcard imagery warranted to render a 22-year-old Midwestern rube such as myself speechless. As we motored past Mill Valley’s timbered city hall, I beheld, at high noon on the front lawn, a ringer for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi massaging the back of a stunning, shirtless young woman with a nut-brown tan. The effect of such a tableau on a barely post-collegiate hayseed cannot be overstated. Man, I remember thinking but (I hope) not actually saying, this is GREAT . . . .

So when I returned to Mill Valley, last month for a weekend with my girlfriend, I made a point of strolling past city hall and gazing, “Summer of ‘42”-ish, at the site of my innocent’s epiphany on the California good life. I would like to report that I was swept away in a Proustian reverie; instead, what I mostly thought about was getting in out of the mid-winter Pacific cold.

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Mill Valley, population 13,000, has an ambivalent relationship with tourism. It is, on the one hand, home to the mighty Mill Valley Film Festival, held each autumn, and a magnet for weekenders from San Francisco and package tourists stopping on their way to gape at the ancient sequoias in nearby Muir Woods. But Mill Valley is also a well-heeled suburb of celebrity townies (residents past and present include the late Jerry Garcia, bandmate Bob Weir, Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar, and psychologist John Gray, author of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”).

Tweedy, self-conscious good taste rules, with a daffy aromatherapy-and-Esalen overlay. “Everybody in Mill Valley has a massage therapist,” shrugged the desk clerk at the Mill Valley Inn, a newly constructed 16-room hotel opened in 1994 on the edge of downtown. Legend has it the inn breezed through the usually interminable Marin County approval processes because the town folk wanted a nice place where they could stash their weekend guests. They got it. Instead of cloying bed-and-breakfast quaint, the rooms and two cottages are outfitted with artfully distressed armoires, writing desks and side tables constructed from salvaged materials by California artisans; queen-size wrought iron beds rigged with Portuguese cotton linens; and, in some rooms, wood stoves (supplied, somewhat meanly, with a Duraflame-style pressed log), and slate-tiled balconies with English ivy and bougainvilla climbing the trellis. Room rates range from $125 to $165 and include a decent continental breakfast served in-room or in a drafty second-floor solarium (opt for the former) and free parking in the hotel garage.

The blend of contemporary and antique is pulled together with confidence but the layout of the hotel sometimes defies logic--the expensive third-floor rooms, for example, open onto a roofless corridor that seems winningly rustic until you fumble for the room key at midnight in a Marin cloudburst. The hotel also fronts busy Throckmorton Avenue--request a room on the quieter back side, with its view, best from rooms 14 and 12, of a redwood grove and Cascade Canyon Creek (as well as a used-furniture store and several houses).

The inn’s owners mysteriously proclaim it a “European Style Pensione,” a redundancy on the order of “Eskimo Style Igloo.” Inaccurate, too, since the Mill Valley Inn is really a throwback to the idiosyncratic hotels that were a fixture in American small towns until the interstates and national motel chains drove them from the scene. Most of what you want to do in Mill Valley is within walking distance--from shopping at the likes of Wilkes Sport, the racier cousin of San Francisco’s Wilkes Bashford haberdashery, to dining at Piazza D’Angelo, the snazzy trattoria run by the inn’s co-owners, brothers Paolo and Domenico Petrone. The inn also makes possible staying in Mill Valley in San Francisco-level accommodations, instead of fighting the traffic and fog across the Golden Gate Bridge at the end of a day trip. You can leave LAX or Burbank as late as 7 on a Friday night, rent a car at the San Francisco or Oakland airport, and make it to Mill Valley in time for a late dinner.

After checking in Friday night and berthing our ridiculous Chevy Corsica rental in the inn’s garage, we hied ourselves over to supper at Avenue Grill, which the desk clerk/concierge had recommended. Displaced New Yorkers will feel right at home in this warm and bustling bistro with its chrome-edged bar stools, banquettes and frantic kitchen open to the dining room. We gulped red wine by the glass to put the color back in our cheeks, shared a platter of Washington oysters, then tore into the evening’s specials. My grilled swordfish was perfect: sweet, moist and hot off the grill.

Rain was forecast for Saturday afternoon, so after an early lunch of warm roast chicken sandwiches and creamy polenta at Annabelle’s on the town square, we steamed out of town to Muir Woods, a 15-minute drive. After a stop at the visitor center for a map, we ditched the crowds and screaming kids on the main trail that follows Redwood Creek and began scaling Dipsea Trail. Dipsea actually goes all the way to Stinson Beach, but we bailed after 45 minutes, wary of the lowering sky.

After returning to town, I headed to the Center for Massage Therapy while my girlfriend took in “Shanghai Triad” at the funky Sequoia Theater, site of the annual film festival screenings. There are fancier places to get a massage in Mill Valley, complete with all manner of New Age claptrap. But the center, just down the block from the inn in a second-story walkup above the Coffee Roastery, seemed agreeably unpretentious. It offers one-hour massages from a variety of disciplines for $52, which you can charge to your room. I was worked over expertly by a young woman specializing in Swedish and Esalen techniques who finished by asking rhetorically: “So, your back doesn’t hurt anymore, right?”

The rain had begun in earnest as we picked our way under hotel umbrellas to our 8:30 dinner reservation at Piazza d’Angelo. It is a measure of this perpetually jammed restaurant’s popularity that new arrivals kept piling up at the reservations desk despite the biblical downpour that had half the dining room glancing nervously at the clatter emanating from the glass roof. The pizzas, pastas and meat, foul and fish entrees are large and hearty, and when the suckling pig special is sold out by 9, you know you’re not in L.A.

Sunday morning we supplemented the inn’s continental breakfast with a late breakfast at the Sunnyside Cafe, a snug, cheerful diner off the square that’s clearly a favorite with locals. (Try the pancakes, thick but amazingly light.) Shopping ranges from predictable upscale boutiques to gentrification gems like Village Music, with its astonishing colleciton of vinyl albums and singles.

Late Sunday afternoon we ended up at Peet’s Coffee & Tea, the Mill Valley branch of the Berkeley coffeehouse chain, for a blast of Arabian Mocha-Java before heading back across the Golden Gate to the airport.

Across the way at the Depot coffee shop and bookstore, locals swaddled in natural fibers sunned themselves on the terrace. The town’s omnipresent golden retrievers tied up outside the stores and cafes woofed mournfully for their masters. Saabs and Volvos and Range Rovers nimbly criss-crossed the square. A smartly turned out couple parked and ambled into Peet’s. “That’s the problem with so many choices,” remarked the man to the woman. “You can’t make a choice.”

The Mill Valley that so inflamed my imagination that blazing long-ago afternoon is probably gone for good. But it’s still a nice place to visit.

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Budget for Two

Air fare: $277.00

Mill Valley Inn, 2 nights: $362.00

Avis Rent-a-Car: $82.00

Dinner, Avenue Grill: $65.00

Lunch, Annabelle’s: $37.00

Dinner, Piazza d’Angelo: $80.00

Breakfast, Sunnyside Cafe: $18.00

FINAL TAB: $921.00

Mill Valley Inn, 165 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley, CA 94941; tel. (800) 595-2100. Muir Woods National Monument, tel. (415) 388-2595.