Nice, thanks!!
There is a restaurant on the beach near Diamond Head, Hao Tree Lanai, that still has the huge Hao tree that Stevenson is said to have described while staying in Hawaii.
“Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie,
Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me;
Here he lies, where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
His Self-written Epitaph.
I think the weirdest honeymoon would go to the first couple. What with Michelle not really liking guys and Barry liking them too much.Not to mention, the huge pictures of Chairman Mao and Mohammed over the bed.
There is more to the story. Stevenson had tuberculosis (then called “consumption.”) Before there were treatments, the main thing you did was look for a dry, arid climate which apparently made the symptoms of the disease less severe (like Arizona—gunslinger Doc Holliday is an example of someone who went to a desert climate to find relief). Much of Stevenson’s life journey was trying to find a climate that would not exacerbate or would ideally “heal” his tuberculosis.
San Francisco was definitely not the place to be because of all the fog, and it had a dramatic effect on him. I think before that, he had arrived in Sacramento (same problem, with the fog from the delta). So he tried to get away from the City and the fog.
He went to Napa Valley (Calistoga was known as a health sanatorium, with hot springs and mud baths that supposedly had restorative powers), but if you’ve spent time in Napa Valley you know that during much of the year and especially in the summer, the fog from the coast basically comes in every night (and usually lifts the next morning around 10 or so).
So the only solution was to try to get above the fog layer. He did that by going up Mr. St. Helena to the old abandoned mining camp.
The other thing I thought was interesting in his account, “The Silverado Squatters,” was his description of constantly hearing buzzing noises—he couldn’t figure out what the sound was although it was all all around him. Somebody finally told him that there were rattlesnakes in the mining camp—in fact, the camp was infested with them. Stevenson and his family (and their dog) were fortunate not to get bitten.
Spent a night in Calistoga in the ‘60s—my parents had friends there and took us all to visit them. We stayed in a house that was supposedly on property that Stevenson had visited (the house had been built later). The house was supposedly haunted.