By Morf Morford, Tacoma Daily Index

Thanks to a family connection, by marriage, I was invited to a wedding in the central coastal California area – Carmel-by-the-sea to be precise.

Carmel, as you might know already, is the town where Clint Eastwood was a one term mayor (and still lives there) and is where celebrities from Doris Day to John Steinbeck and Bing Crosby have called home.

It is right next to Pebble Beach.

And not far from Big Sur.

The town center has no street addresses, (houses and businesses have names instead of numbers) and other than the immediate downtown core, there are no sidewalks. And no streetlights.

Residential streets curve around the hilly, ravine-dense terrain, trees are protected to such a degree that homes, garages and fences, and even power lines go around them.

Trees there are not the straight-up types we are accustomed to; they are short and twisty, laden with dangling lichens thanks to the morning mist that saturates everything – at least for the few hours before the sun breaks through.

And the trees are dense with butterflies and birds of all sizes, colors and species.

Once part of Mexico, colored tiles and the South-of-the-border ambience saturates every aspect of life from landscape to architecture to history and food.

No chain stores are allowed in the town. You won’t find a Walmart or Walgreens in Carmel.

Besides exceptional dining and boutique-everything, nearly 100 art galleries line the town’s orderly (but not numbered) grid of streets, with a historic Spanish mission at the southern end of town.

The city bans ice cream cones (too touristy) and high heeled shoes (too dangerous on the uneven streets).

To get a close look at what you might find there, take a look here.

GPS barely helps

Google, GPS and Apple maps show every address of every city in the country except Carmel.

Those navigational systems will get you close to your destination.

But to get in the door, you are on your own those last few blocks.

About 4,000 people live there, but about a million others visit each year.

Almost every home is an artisan project with a near infinite budget.

To put it mildly, this not an area known for its “affordable” housing. You might be able to find a home there for about 1 million.

Brad Pitt just bought a $40 million cliffside bachelor pad, of sandstone and granite, which sits on a bluff in the Carmel Highlands, with, of course, an ocean view.

To put it mildly, this is not the world most of us inhabit.

The wedding

The wedding itself took place (with live music, catered food, and stunning views) at the home of the new couple, outside of town, several miles up a winding dirt road in the hills of Carmel Valley.

Their home is so far up in the hills that there is no municipal water supply. They have a truckload of water delivered every week or so – for home use and for their pool.

It was the second marriage for her, the third for him.

As a few guests spoke, each one mentioned their relationship with the bride and groom.

One long time friend of the groom, besides telling a few stories of their college years together, proclaimed loudly, “I’ve been to all three of your weddings!”

That is, apparently, how they do things there.

Most of the friends (for whatever reason, there were very few family members present) were very successful business owners or consultants, who, at the various dinners and banquets, vied to pay for them for all of us.

The food, as you might expect, was local, artisan and hand-crafted. One dinner featured round after round of appetizers of grilled vegetables and locally made, organic, small batch mozzarella cheeses.

All of this with multiple hillside wineries in the distance.

In such a location, with such food, landscape and congenial company, you might get the feeling that there was not a problem or conflict anywhere in the world.

One man I spoke to mentioned that his daughter had horses on one of their properties. He had bought her six – at $100,000 each.

One young woman showed us a recent purchase; her YSL handbag. She mentioned that it was about half-price and cost twelve. She didn’t mean dollars. I believe it was this one.

Car-aphonia

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in California over the past few decades, and one element has absolutely NOT changed; the absolute dependence on cars.

In this part of the country, most cars are BMWs or Mercedes, with an ever-increasing number of Teslas and other electric or hybrid cars.

The major highway is the sometimes crowded, but always visually stunning Highway 1 (yes, the very first highway in terms of numbering in the USA). You can see what makes it so appealing here.

But electric or not, cars are the bane – and the ultimate necessity – of life in California.

In short, cars and phones are everywhere.

While I was there, I couldn’t quite tell if I was in the future or in some mythical past – or just some alternate reality far from crisis or human need.

Either way, though not far, that life is a world away,

Tacoma, in all its mundane grittiness, is, in its own way our own habitat.

A couple, babe in arms, with an “Anything helps” cardboard sign greeted us as we took the first Tacoma exit off I-5 on our way home.

It was a Tacoma-style welcome home.