@ossobuco,
Well, my plan was to think of some places I like in California. Perhaps Healdsburg and its town square. So I looked up Healdsburg on google image and found a bunch of photos, among which, what? a beach? looked at the photo url and it said spring lake. Looked up Spring lake and it isn't in Healdsburg. But by that time I'd already posted the photo thinking it was Healdsburg and had to scramble to find out if the photo i.d. was right.
Well, the Spring Lake information was on some site which mentioned the Russian River and I thought the photo looked more like a river. I then checked out a Russian River Valley site, somehow found there is a Healdsburg Veteran's Memorial Park by the river, and found it on a map.
Damnation, I've been a block from there many times and never knew it was there.
Reason I like Healdsburg is that it is one of the beautiful towns of Sonoma County, which, besides being a vineyard area is just plain gorgeous generally.
Specifically, I used to stop in Healdsburg at a grocery on the market square on every trip I drove from the far north of California to places south like San Francisco or Los Angeles... and then get back on the on ramp precisely south of where that park by the river is, if I was going north. So, I've missed seeing that beach something like, uh, thirty times.
Now, what I was saying about access is that apparently though the river and its shore to high tide are public, most of the land surrounding the river is privately owned. Thus this park is one of the three public access entries to the river - according to what I ran across online.
Further, the Russian River is sentimental for me, in that I have a photo of my father and his brother fishing on it as teenagers around 1918,
