As you may have gathered from my relative silence in these pages, I am on holiday. The primary reason for being in California is to attend the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat which has moved from the place which gave it its name to nearby Monterey.

This event is only its second year. I dropped by as a delegate last year, intrigued by the ambition of its founder, Chris La Cour, in setting up a new conference in midsummer in a remote coastal corner of the US, and by his impressive list of speakers.

Those included US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck, whose keynote speech provided me with the material for my most widely-read article last year. Those of us who heard it may not have predicted the startling events which followed as Judge Peck’s speech mutated from a speech into his article Search, Forward and thence into the most widely-discussed judicial opinion of 2012, but we certainly felt that the ground was moving under our feet as he spoke.

I am back this year as a panelist. As you can see from the list of speakers, I am in distinguished company.

Last year, my wife Mary Ann and I used the conference as a springboard for a road trip, driving from San Francisco down to Cambria, and then north via the conference up to Point Reyes, Mendocino and Fort Bragg.

This year we started in Las Vegas, flying from there to Los Angeles where we picked up a car. After a couple of nights at Pasadena, we drove north, staying at Santa Barbara, and Cambria, before fetching up at Carmel. I am writing this from the verandah of a room overlooking the sea at the Mission Ranch, a place rescued from development by Clint Eastwood (former mayor of Carmel) and turned into an extremely pleasant hotel. We move to Monterey on Sunday night for the conference.

We have seen the most beautiful things on this trip – collections of European and American art, Hearst Castle, missions, landscapes and sea views, and animals and birds. We moved from Gainsborough, Romney and Hopper to otters, seals and hawks to mountains, beaches and forests. We have seen where Pretty Woman shopped in Beverley Hills, where Hearst entertained Chaplin and Churchill at San Simeon and where Orson Welles bought a cabin for Rita Hayworth by the sea at Nepenthe on a romantic whim.

We are cherry-picking, of course, as one can on holiday, and there is plenty which is not so good in this near-bankrupt state.  Nor is California unique in its accumulation of attractive things. One cultural skill seems to elude them in this land of good taste and agricultural plenty: there is more to cooking than heaping mountains of calories on a plate and covering them with salt.

All in all, however, there has been little which falls short of perfection. I will try to write about some of it before the opening of the conference brings another wave of day-job scribbling.

There are some pictures here.

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