Sausalito

We reached Sausalito by bicycle, which is the right way and also the smug way. We’d rented bikes in San Francisco and pedaled across the Golden Gate Bridge — terrifying, magnificent, wind trying to peel us off the deck — and then coasted down the far side into a town that looked, to my French eyes, unexpectedly like the Ligurian coast. Pastel houses climbing a steep green hill, boats everywhere, and the light coming off the bay so bright we had to squint. We bought two coffees and sat on the seawall, legs aching, entirely happy.

The waterfront and the view back

Sausalito’s whole life faces the water, and its greatest asset is the thing across it: from the little parks and cafés along Bridgeway, you look straight back at San Francisco, the towers and the bridge and the ferries crossing. We spent an afternoon doing very little — drifting between galleries, watching sea lions haul out on the dock pilings, eating fish by the marina. There’s an elegant, moneyed ease to the town now, but it wears it gently. Bronze statues, a small stony beach, the constant clink of halyards on masts. It is a place that rewards sitting still, which after the bridge crossing was all we wanted to do.

The houseboats

The strangest and most wonderful corner of Sausalito is its houseboat community, north of the center along the old waterfront. Hundreds of floating homes crowd the docks here, and they are gloriously eccentric — three-story follies, funky driftwood cottages, tidy little barges with gardens on their decks. We walked the narrow gangways as quietly as we could, aware we were peering into people’s front yards, and marveled at a way of living I’d never imagined. The community grew out of the town’s bohemian, boat-building past, when artists and dreamers colonized the mudflats after the war. It still hums with that spirit, half neighborhood, half art project, rocking gently on the tide.

Up the hill, and the headlands beyond

The town climbs, and so did we, up stairways and lanes between the hillside houses until the marina shrank below and the whole bay opened out. Sausalito sits at the foot of the Marin Headlands, and if you have the legs you can keep going into that wild, windswept country of green ridges and old gun batteries above the Golden Gate. We only went as far as a bench where a local was reading, but the view from there — city, bridge, bay, the fog just beginning to spill over the far hills — was one of those that fixes a place in you permanently. Then we rolled back down for the ferry.

Getting There

The loveliest way to reach Sausalito is by ferry from San Francisco — boats run from the Ferry Building and Fisherman’s Wharf, and the half-hour crossing past Alcatraz and under the bridge is worth the fare on its own. By car it’s just across the Golden Gate Bridge, about a 20-minute drive from downtown, though parking in town is tight and dear on weekends. Cyclists pour over the bridge from the city all summer and ferry back with their bikes, which we can wholeheartedly recommend. Bring a windproof layer whatever the season: the bay breeze is cool, and the famous fog can roll in and swallow the whole view in minutes.