Weekend Escape: Malibu : Inn makes perfect staging area for launching an operation to entertain out-of-town visitors

MALIBU â€”  “Really, I’d be happy to sleep on the couch,â€� said Suzanne, my friend from Boston who was arriving with her two daughters for a late-winter escape to sunshine. We could put Alexandra, 10, and Jessica, 8, on our narrow little guest beds, but we couldn’t multiply the bathroom (singular). We could enjoy the coziness of it all for a couple of nights, but five? No way.

Thus was hatched a getaway inside a vacation.

Our first thought was San Diego or Santa Barbara, for all the usual tourist reasons. But why drive three hours when the people you’re with have never seen Malibu? So why not Malibu? A 30-minute drive to a beach weekend--what a concept.

The only potential hitch was that Malibu has only one large lodging on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway--the 5-year-old Malibu Beach Inn, 47 rooms plopped onto a narrow strip of land near the Malibu Pier.

“Do they have a pool?� Alex asked. Surely, I thought, and called to check. “No, we don’t have that much land,� the reservations clerk said. “But we’re right on the beach.�

The four of us plus my husband, Rob, and way too much luggage piled into our Toyota sedan. It was a hot weekend, climbing into the 90s inland. Great beach weather.

Hundreds of thousands of other people thought the same thing. The traffic volume, combined with road work on PCH to repair mudslide damage, slowed us to a crawl. From the Santa Monica Pier to the inn, about 15 miles, took us more than an hour.

Tumbling out of the car like a circus clown act, the girls raced for the door. On the other side was paradise. An arched opening to a Mediterranean-style balcony hanging over the beach. Placid, glittering, all traffic noise obliterated by the shushing of the surf. We stood staring at it, avid and greedy, reluctant even to go back and get the luggage. Over the next two days we spent hours on the balcony, eating breakfast while the girls played on the beach, drinking wine and seltzer while the girls played on the beach, reading while the girls played on the beach, always within easy sight and reach.

Our adjoining rooms on the third (top) floor were ample if not spacious, with gas fireplaces, high-arched ceilings, comfy couches, wet bars and huge sliding glass doors to an unobstructed million-dollar ocean view. Breakfast was included with the room rate (reduced, when we asked about it, from $165 to $150 because we were booking two rooms for two nights). Room service was available from Alice’s Restaurant next door on the pier. The room was well-stocked with pricey drinks and snacks, and bottles of decent wine were available at the front desk, with its young and hospitable staff.

The first evening, we practically had to drag the girls off the beach for dinner. On the suggestion of friends, we were going to Saddle Peak Lodge, high in the hills above Malibu and only 15 minutes from the beach, in the tiny community of Monte Nido just south of Calabasas. It’s isolated on a woodsy side road off Las Virgenes Road, expensive and almost always on lists of the top 40 restaurants in Southern California. Not the sort of place we’d usually take children, but we figured Jessie and Alex could handle it.

What no one was prepared for were the heads of deer, antelope and anything else with hoofs lining the walls of the several dining rooms. Lamp bases made with deer forelegs. Stuffed fowl on all the flat surfaces. “There are dead animals everywhere!� Jessie howled.

We played chair roulette at our spacious table until the girls didn’t have to look directly into glass eyes, then proceeded to act like carnivores. Jessie smoothly ordered a $10 smoked salmon appetizer and a $15 bowl of “Kick-Ass Chili,� which was prepared with more finesse than it was named. Alex even ended up liking the $26 venison, tender and rich, for which the lodge is famous. The desserts were chocolate knockouts. Wandering around after dinner, we wished we’d come in the daylight to sit on the lush patios with long views. No wonder it’s so hard to get a weekend brunch reservation.

Dinner the second night, at Alice’s on the pier, was a contrast. Though also a clearly adult restaurant, its informality allowed the girls and adults to relax--there were no clenched-teeth reminders to behave from Mom. The inn had made our reservation for us and we had a table right at the window, in front. Suzanne and I could still split a bottle of wine since we didn’t have to drive. (Rob had taken a taxi home that afternoon to be at work the next morning, something he sure couldn’t have done from San Diego.) We ambled home on the sidewalk next to PCH in a beachy glow of happiness, and too lazy and full to climb down to the beach for the few hundred yards to the inn. The surf sent me right to sleep, but Suzanne, who found the wave noise “kind of relentless,� had to close the windows.

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We made side trips to the Getty Museum and Paramount Ranch. The “ranch,� really an old movie studio Western town built originally by Paramount Studios and now absorbed into Malibu Creek State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, is an active set for the TV series “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.� No filming was going on during the weekend, so the set was open. Because it’s a live set, there’s been a lot of recent refurbishing. The pretend graveyard behind the “schoolhouse� is even stocked with markers for relatives of the series’ characters. There’s a blacksmith, general store and more--real buildings, not just Hollywood facades, on three little streets, with a railroad station and real rail cars. And it’s all free.

“There’s the school. There’s her office. There’s the place where the letter guy lives. Where’s Dr. Quinn’s house?� the girls asked. We spent a happy hour at make-believe. The J. Paul Getty Museum was our last stop of the weekend. We had made reservations for parking (required and very limited at the museum) two weeks in advance. This isn’t a place you can just drop in on. (Due to a new agreement with the neighbors, you can only enter the museum by coming in your car or arriving on the bus with a pass from the bus driver.) But it’s free and once you’re there, the Getty’s big gardens and small galleries make it a happy place to take kids--you’re never more than a minute from an outdoor spot where they can let off a little steam. Jessie and Alex were delighted when the docent told us every guest is encouraged to pick “one little bit of a favorite herb� in the huge Roman-style kitchen garden.

Built in 1974 in the style of a classical Roman villa, it’s a great big frame for the first-floor collection of antiquities, the late Getty’s passion. Upstairs are the painting galleries, including the famous Van Gogh “Irises.� For lunch, we had decent salads and sandwiches in the museum’s charming outdoor eatery. For the adults, a chief delight of the weekend was avoiding theme parks. We had a real ocean, not a water park. A working Western set, not a studio tour. All in our little slice of paradise beside PCH.

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Budget for Five

Malibu Beach Inn, two nights, two rooms @ $168 each: $672.00

Dinner, Saddle Peak Lodge: 257.58

Dinner, Alice’s Restaurant: 86.40

Lunch, Pier View Cafe, Malibu: 58.40

Lunch, Getty Museum: 28.00

Video rentals at inn: 10.00

Gas: 6.00

FINAL TAB: $1,118.38

Malibu Beach Inn, 22878 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, CA 90265, tel. (800) 462-5428; Saddle Peak Lodge, (310) 456-7325; Alice’s Restaurant, (310) 456-6646; Getty Museum parking reservations, (310) 458-2003.