The Stevensons' lodging was dilapidated: "The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters." But he didn't seem to care. The "favoured nook," as he described it, was flat and shaded and offered luminous views of the vineyards below. As I hurtled up the winding trail, I half expected to meet the writer's ghost, sitting naked on a boulder.Īfter about 20 minutes, I spotted a plaque peeking through the pines, its stone face shimmering in the afternoon sun. "It was here that Stevenson would lie naked taking his sunbaths," biographer Claire Harman wrote. I paused to catch my breath, then made my way, half-running, half-stumbling, up the narrow path through towering trees. And I met no one on the poorly signed track that led from the main road. There was no one in the parking lot when I arrived. I had just an hour left before closing time. I said goodbye to Dahl, jumped in my car and sped to the entrance of Robert Louis Stevenson State Park seven miles north of Calistoga. Stevenson's grandfather clock said 3:50 p.m. "Stevenson's stepdaughter, Belle, would often take dictation," Barrett told me as we squinted at the writer's spidery scrawl.
Highlights included the author's writing desk, his grandfather clock and intriguing examples of his messy, backward-sloping handwriting. Museum director Barrett Dahl led me through the permanent exhibition. (Robert Louis Stevenson Museum )Īfter a tour of the cellars and a small wine-tasting of my own, I drove along California 128 to the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum, the world's largest collection of Stevenson memorabilia, in St. "ĭisplay case housing the marriage license for Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne (nee Van De Grift) from 1880 in San Francisco, first edition of "The Silverado Squatters" at the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum in St. Which may explain why he and Fanny left their comfortable hotel in Calistoga and spent the rest of their honeymoon "squatting" in a broken-down mining lodge in nearby Silverado: hence the title of his book "The Silverado Squatters. "Sightseeing is the art of disappointment," he wrote of the Petrified Forest. Although the walk itself was pleasant enough, the gray chunks of fossilized wood were underwhelming. Louis took a shine to Charley, but the forest left him feeling "mightily unmoved." The park's half-mile trail eventually leads to the Robert Stevenson Tree, where the author purportedly met Charley Evans, the proprietor. "And a broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume." "The sun warmed me to the heart," he wrote of this particular journey. Then I followed the Silverado Trail out of town toward the Petrified Forest (reopening May 1), just as the newlyweds had done 137 years before. In the afternoon, I visited the small Stevenson exhibit at the Sharpsteen Museum on Washington Street.
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