I found it when I was at Cal Poly, and it became my favorite place on earth, and it has never lost the title.

The entrance is a road lined with eucalyptus, tall and silver green, and driving into it always did something to me, some small reliable lift, like the curtain going up before a show. Every single time. You turn onto that road under those trees and you can feel that something beautiful is about to open in front of you, and then it does. The cliffs drop straight into the ocean. There’s a beach cove tucked in, and trails running along the bluffs, and the whole thing just sits there being golden and enormous and unbothered, the way it has for longer than any of us.

I am not a traveler. I never have been, and I’ve made my peace with it, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. The beauty I go looking for is right here, in my own backyard. Some people need to cross the world to feel small in the good way, humbled and quiet in front of something bigger than themselves. I just needed to drive down a eucalyptus road to Montaña de Oro. It was always enough.

For years it was where I went to come back to myself. When I was stressed, when the weight of things got to be too much, I’d take my dogs and go, and they’d hike the trails with me and splash in the water, and something in me would settle that couldn’t settle anywhere else. It brought me back to nature, and nature brought me back to me. I’d arrive wound up and leave put back together.

I brought my parents there several times over the years. And there’s one photograph I keep, of my mother and me on the bluffs, our arms over each other’s shoulders, both of us just happy. She looks happy in it. I hold on to her happiness. She’s gone, but the bluffs aren’t. I can still stand in the exact spot where we stood, where someone caught the two of us with the ocean behind us, and she is still there, in that place, happy, with her arm around me.

A few years ago I took my kids. My son and his girlfriend played volleyball on the beach, and standing there watching them, it dawned on me all at once that they were right around the age I’d been when I first found this place. I hadn’t planned it. I hadn’t even thought about it until I was standing in it. But there it was: the young woman who found this coast had become the mother watching her grown kids play on it, and the coast had held still through all of it, the same cliffs, the same cove, the same trees making the same promise at the entrance. It was a full circle I didn’t see coming until I was standing inside it.

That’s what that place is to me. It’s a keeper. It has held every version of me I’ve ever been, the college girl finding it for the first time, the young woman escaping to it with her dogs when the weight of things got heavy, the daughter with her arm around a mother who’s no longer here, and the older woman watching her children on the same sand. All of us, still there, somewhere in the gold of it.

I never needed to see the rest of the world. I had a mountain of gold three hours down the coast, and it had everyone I loved in it.