California

Older

An ode to the filmmakers’ favorite American town, Mill Valley, California Jules and Effin Older write, take photographs and make films. They live in Auckland, New Zealand.

Hiking in the Redwoods. Photo Deborah Gaines (3)

By Deborah Gaines Even the greatest writers struggle to describe redwood trees. John Steinbeck called them “ambassadors from another time,” while Walt Whitman hailed “the deities of the West.” Theodore Roosevelt compared a grove of giant redwoods to “a great and beautiful cathedral.” For a long time, I just didn’t

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By Brian E. Clark When I lived in San Francisco, I drove past Redding on Interstate 5 numerous times on my way to kayak whitewater rivers north and south of the Oregon border, cycle around Crater Lake, attend plays at the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and ski at the Whistler/Blackcomb

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By Brian E. Clark In more than two decades of living in California during my peripatetic newspaper career, I traveled the state from north to south. (East to West, too.) I called San Francisco, Nevada City, Davis, Modesto, and San Diego home and wrote about places from Mount Shasta in

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  Story & photos by Julie Snyder Wide awake in our Barstow, California hotel room at 3 a.m., Joe and I pondered our next move. Did we carry on east to the Grand Canyon despite the winter travel advisory and frigid temperatures? Or cancel our reservations and point Van Go

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By Brian E. Clark For decades, so the story goes, Paso Robles was a mere pitstop off California’s Highway 101 for wine aficionados on their way to the Napa and Sonoma valleys.  But that began changing about two decades ago, and Paso Robles – which means Passage of the Oaks in Spanish

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Fillmore Street & Coronavirus, a film by Jules & Effin Older       Jules Older is author and publisher of the ebooks, DEATH BY TARTAR SAUCE: A Travel Writer Encounters Gargantuan Gators, Irksome Offspring, Murderous Mayonnaise & True Love and SKIING THE EDGE: Humor, Humiliation, Holiness and Heart   Effin Older is

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By David McKay Wilson  The snow kept falling during our spring break in South Lake Tahoe – on the shores and in the glorious mountains nearby North America’s largest alpine lake. It flurried at Sierra-at-Tahoe during our warm-up day, as we floated through powder in a magical lichen-covered forest.  It

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Words by Jules Older. Photos by Effin Older. Guerneville, California. It floods. And floods, and floods, and floods. Even now, it’s still replanting, rebuilding, re-opening from its most recent flood which, in February 2019, poured four feet of water over Main Street. While it’s indisputably true that floods cause heartache

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  Photos by Effin Older. Words by Jules Older When you say Benicia, San Franciscans tend to scorn. “Why go there?” they sigh. Here’s why. Just an hour or so north of the Bay Bridge, Benicia is a surprise-filled with surprises.     For 13 months in the 1850s, it