The Inn at Newport Ranch

Usually the ‘getting there’ of a getaway is a total faff: airport traffic, fumbling over the wrong currency in the taxi, stumbling into the lobby and feeling like an absolute wreck after all of the above.

Not so here. The Inn at Newport Ranch is a jaw-dropping five-and-a-half-hour cruise up the iconic Highway 1 from San Francisco, through pretty coastal villages and verdant bluffs, the ocean sparkling below (you could shave off an hour on the 101, but this would spoil the fun). It is the most, and in fact probably the only, restorative drive I have ever enjoyed. ‘Is that a whale?!’ I cry to Mrs Smith, peering out at the endless bright blue sea (it is actually seaweed, but sightings aren’t infrequent).

We arrive at sunset, the sound of waves soft in the distance, swallows flitting and diving in the last of the light, cows lowing as they cross the meadow, the silhouette of a solitary and weathered cypress tree outside the inn itself. To the east is a ridge of alpen, maple and redwood forest, to the west is the open sea, to the north is the ‘Lost Coast’, where the highway stops dead and heads inland, and to the south is the golden sliver of Ten Mile Beach. Everything, everywhere, is calm. It is the closest to a sense of absolute tranquillity that I have ever had. 

The lobby, in this case, is stumble-proof: an unobtrusive little desk inside the ranch farmhouse, surrounded by stained-glass panes of gulls on the waves and trees on the ridgeway. Of course there’s a little bell (we’re assisted by the very lovely and equally unobtrusive River). Across a courtyard from the inn, The Ranch House, where we are staying, is a two-floor farmhouse, with rustic-chic designer lighting and a maple-wood finish — it’s a little like an alpine chalet, and a little like a stately ship afloat on a wildflower sea.

Because it’s late in the day, dinner (sourdough, nettle carbonara and a delectable NY strip, with blushing squash and pommes paillasson) comes to us, in our little house among the prairie grasses, and is washed down with a zesty local white wine. The next morning we walk 20 steps to the main inn, and gaze out at the endless Pacific Ocean as fresh coffee and eggs served with wild garlic emerge from the kitchen, a roaring hearth beside us. 

Satisfied bellies are fuel for the hiking trails. Little hand-carved tables are scattered across the 2,200 acres (I plonked myself on one on the cliff edge before dinner, painting a ludicrously childish watercolour of the cove that even Baby Smith sneered at). Because the headland is a mosaic of different wildflowers and native grasses, there is much to ogle at. Mendocino has a rare geology, a series of terraces pushed up from the ocean flat, so they create a staircase-like structure rather than the continuous mountainous slopes that make up the landscape just to the north and just to the south. And so where you are sitting, in a very primal sense, is ancient and special.

I think the English Romantics would have swooned for the Mendocino coastline, wandering lonely, and so forth. But while it all very well yammering on about how beautiful it all is, you want to see it for yourself. Elliott, a former forest ranger, takes us on a tour of the property in an all-terrain buggy after we’re full from breakfast, zooming along the windy headland, then up into the redwood forests — once felled and floated down the coast in the 1860s to build San Francisco, but which now burst with life (hacksaws used to bring down the mighty trees are hung on the walls of in The Ranch House). Kayak tours of the coves are also available, but we stick to dry land. 

Up we climb, hundreds of feet, to a tiny promontory in the forest, where golden grasses wave lazily and butterflies waft about in the breeze, the green grasslands spread out beneath us and beyond them the sea (and, for the eagle-eyed, a winery just next door to the ranch that, if we'd had the time, we'd have whiled away another day at). Another perfectly placed table crowns the scene. The hotel has packed us freshly made picnic sandwiches that are perfect in a way that only American sandwiches are: generous, hunky, well-designed, easily demolished. Then it’s an hour-or-so hike back down to the ranch, Baby Smith giggling away in her backpack carrier, Mr and Mrs Smith singing the whole way down. 

That sunset, by the way, is extraordinary, more like an explosion than an exit, spreading across the horizon like a drop in the ocean, the kind of finale that people applaud. Baby Smith asleep back in the room, we catch round two from the same dining room we enjoyed breakfast in, sloshing down a very nice red wine, and wondering where the upstairs hot tub is. Then we totter back across the yard, gazing at the brilliant stars above. People are fond of saying life is about the journey and not the destination, but they are wrong, because in this instance clearly it is very much about both.