From Carmel, California

It was probably the strangest restaurant experience I’ve ever had. We were in a small, glass-enclosed dining area at the back of the Porta Bella restaurant in Carmel, California, “outside” enough to be considered of legal standing for diners wishing to bring their canine companions.

And bring them they did. Two tables to our right was a young couple with a Jack Russell terrier. Immediately to our right was an elderly couple from Phoenix, Arizona, who had brought their five-pound Yorkie. And at the table to our left was a six-foot nine inch African American basketball player and his pregnant (white) wife with their two Labs, one black, one white.


And then there was Ellie and me—and George, the dog. George is one of the lucky ones. He normally spends his time between a very nice house at the east end of the Hollywood Hills with a wonderful view down Hollywood Boulevard, with the Griffith Park Observatory overlooking it from the north; and a particularly lovely 1930s cottage in Laguna Beach. He is royally pampered—a treatment he considers it his right to expect, being of aristocratic lineage and handsome mien.

It is the Laguna Beach cottage, strangely, that has led us to this dinner. After much debate, we decided that it was time to do some work to update it—particularly the long-neglected kitchen and a garage, down below, that seemed to have been built with a Model-T Ford in mind, so narrow as to preclude any possible use by a modern vehicle, even our modestly-scaled Prius.

To escape the noise and the dust and the general chaos of the remodel, we decided to take a road trip with George the dog. Long in the planning, it required a great deal of research into dog-friendly accommodations along the way, and we arrived here in Carmel yesterday, Monday, on the first day of our journey from Southern California to the San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound, in the far northern state of Washington. The Porta Bella provided us with our first dining experience of the trip.

So, to start at the beginning: we left our Los Angeles home a half hour later than my six o-clock plan, with a pause at Starbucks for a cup of coffee and a muffin to stave off the pangs until later in the morning. George was, I suppose—I have no way of knowing the inner workings of his mind, but plan to make reliable guesses as I go—surprised to be bundled into the car so early in the day. He was also less than delighted to be relegated to the back seat, rather than the lap in front that he usually prefers. Well, truth to tell, he considers it his right.


He spent a good deal of the nearly six-hour drive with a reproachful nose planted firmly between the two front seats and inching forward, he hoped imperceptibly, with the transparent goal of transplanting himself unnoticed from back to front.

Didn’t happen. We coasted up easily along the 101, through Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo, with a brief stop at Los Alamos for gas for the Prius and a hurry-up for George. (Since puppyhood, George has learned that “hurry-up” means pee, so that he now performs when reminded respectfully that is it time to do so. I suspect that he also understands the word “poop,” since he tends to perform that function, also, when reminded.) From San Luis, we turned off on the coastal road, Highway 1, and stopped again for a mid-morning breakfast in Cambria—a ham-and-egg sandwich which sounded a good deal better on the menu than it turned out to be.

Just north of Cambria, we pulled off the highway into one of the many vista points to allow George a little time for exercise. A path along the cliff brought us to a steep, sandy slope that led down to a deserted beach where he could enjoy the luxury of freedom from the leash to chase his ball.


Ball-chasing is George’s next-to-favorite occupation. His all-time favorite occupation is chasing his ball on the beach. So he was for a few minutes in his own dog heaven.

Up the highway, northward, we followed the climbs and descents of the road along the cliffs that line the Pacific Ocean in this spectacular part of the world; and were shocked by the ravages of the recent Big Sur fire, which has reduced so many acres of the mountainside wilderness to the east of the highway to grey ash.


A sad reminder of the sufferings of our planet in today’s ecologically challenged environment.

Arriving in Carmel, we easily located the hotel that Ellie had booked on the Internet, and were somewhat dismayed by the size and location of our room—particularly the location, on the ground floor, by a back alley from which passers-by could watch our goings-on. It was also noisy, and every sound produced a reaction from a bewildered George, who has never traveled outside Southern California in his life before, and who has certainly never stayed in a hotel.


In the interest, I’m sure, of protecting his small tribe from the threats of a dangerous external world, he does have a tendency to yap at strange sounds—and many of the sounds, in this dog-friendly hotel (started, we understand, by the dog-friendly Doris Day,) were canine in origin. To George, a challenge that could not go unanswered.

An afternoon walk down to the beach (we had left the ball behind, but discovered another, abandoned one on the sand) brought us to another hotel that welcomed pets—one of many in this extraordinarily dog-tolerant city--and we were directed to a third which seemed to offer an easier solution to the accommodation problem. We checked ourselves, as from tomorrow, out of Doris Day and into the new place, before setting out in search of a restaurant that would welcome George as well as his owners. We found the Bella Porta…