Less is more at a Carmel Valley retreat

Tassajara Hot Springs, Calif. — THE plan was simple enough: Pick up my girlfriend, Katie, rent a vehicle that could withstand an infamously bumpy dirt road, and leave the busy, gritty, noisy cityscape behind. Growing up near Berkeley, I had long heard of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a retreat in Carmel Valley's Ventana Wilderness as famous for its vegetarian cuisine as for its salve-for-all-ills hot springs.

Tassajara is one of the oldest Soto Zen training monasteries outside of Asia, but anyone, including non-Buddhists like Katie and me, is welcome to visit from April 28 to Sept. 10 -- if they can get a reservation. Rooms, cabins, yurts and dorms are doled out on a first-come-first-served basis; the most eager will mail in their requests this week, when the center begins accepting them. I sent ours at the first opportunity, and even then we didn't get our first-choice cabin.

But what ends in tranquillity always seems to begin with mayhem. I misplaced my car keys, then my driver's license, then my cellphone. It was already dusk by the time we began inching our rented SUV up Interstate 5 -- and we were both grumpy. The goal was to push through half the 300-mile trek that evening, stopping to dine at some charming roadside cafe. Instead, we grabbed burgers at In-N-Out, then slept in a smoky motel room decorated with a painting of a neon pink flamingo. Morning brought more greasy fare (Denny's) and more driving.

We stopped at a fruit stand and pressed on, spitting cherry pits out the windows. Finally we left the freeway and wound through brown-green hills, past cattle and horse pastures, rusty mailboxes and patches of yellow and purple wildflowers.

Katie is a city-loving sophisticate who appreciates nature -- from a distance. (This long weekend trip in May required more than a little cajoling.) She used the last reaches of cellular service to commiserate with her mother about the indignities to come: no shower or hot water in the cabin and oil lamps instead of electricity. Bring wine, her mother advised, and lots of it.

At a dusty convenience store somewhere on the outskirts of the Ventana Wilderness, we surveyed jugs and boxes and a bottle or two of wine. We chose a few and threw in a bottle of Thunderbird simply because the idea of taking it to Tassajara made us laugh.