It might be trivial, but I still start when I run across writing about my town. This morning’s NYT magazine has a travelogue by Jonathan Rabin about driving his daughter down the left coast on the way to drop her off at University. It is a sad tale, but it does include a wry little mention of Eureka.
I turned off for Eureka, whose old downtown was repaved and gussied up for the tourist trade with the usual assortment of boutiques and gift shops. We passed a few exuberantly Californian, 19th-century houses, built in witchy Victorian gothic to exhibit what grotesque marvels could be perpetrated on redwood with lathe and chisel. We found a room, with old furniture and thin curtains, in a mildly down-at-heel hotel that dated to 1888 and had an “Irish pub” on its ground floor, where I sat at the bar while Julia left with her camera to hike around the town.
Life of refinement 