Deetjen's Big Sur Inn

Helmuth Deetjen, the Master Builder we called him, was born in Bergen, Norway, and built this inn out of redwood through ten years of his life, in the Norwegian style, close by a mountain stream with the redwoods on every side. It has barely changed. Thin walls, no locks worth the name, and a rule about quiet after ten.

People book it a year out, and Helmuth would be pleased and unsurprised. You do not have to be a guest to eat here, and you should. Breakfast in the dining room is the famous one: eggs Benedict, pancakes, their stuffed French toast, coffee in a heavy mug, by a window looking into the garden and the creek.

Dinner is by candlelight, a short menu cooked well. Book both. The twenty rooms have wood stoves and books and guest journals that people have been writing in since the forties, and no telephone, no television and no signal, which is the point.

The inn is kept by a nonprofit foundation now, so that it stays exactly what Helmuth built, and it is on the National Register. Arrive as a stranger, the journal says, and leave as a friend.