Occidental Car Service & Bohemian Highway Transportation

About ten miles, running north from Freestone through Occidental and Camp Meeker to Monte Rio on the Russian River, where it meets SR-116 and River Road. The distance is misleading, though. It is two lanes with almost no shoulder, tightly wooded, and full of corners where the advisory speeds mean what they say, so it takes noticeably longer to drive than ten miles of open road would. We schedule it as a real leg rather than as a rounding error.

Harder than most drivers expect, and that is not scaremongering — it is why the return leg out of Occidental is the single most-requested booking in west county. Under a redwood canopy there is nothing for headlights to reflect off: no lit frontage, no roadside development, very little signage, and no moon getting through the trees. Add tight radius corners with trunks at the pavement edge and patchy mobile coverage, and it is a stretch of road that rewards someone who has driven it before.

Frequently — it is our most common Occidental booking. The Union Hotel has been serving family-style Italian dinners on the main street since the 1870s, and those meals are an evening rather than a sitting, which is exactly why hourly as-directed service suits them better than two separate legs. The chauffeur and vehicle stay in the village while you eat, so a dinner that runs long is a note to your driver rather than a fresh dispatch request out to a village ten miles up a dark road.

Yes, and we do it often enough that it is worth mentioning on this page. A common arrangement is guests driving themselves out in daylight, when the Bohemian Highway is a pleasure, and booking us for the ride back after dinner. That is a point-to-point trip, flat-rate and quoted upfront, and it is worth reserving in advance rather than assuming a vehicle can be conjured to Occidental at ten in the evening — this is not a village where a car appears in four minutes.

Not in the village itself. Occidental is a dinner and arts town rather than a tasting town, and the honest answer is that if wine is the point of your day, the appointments will be elsewhere in west county and Occidental is where the evening ends. That combination works well: tasting in the afternoon, dinner on the main street, and the drive home handled by someone else. Tell us the appointments you have confirmed and we will build the day so the two halves fit together.

Freestone sits at the south end of the Bohemian Highway where it meets the Bodega Highway, and although it is barely a hamlet it draws people from well outside the county. Wild Flour Bread runs a wood-fired bakery with a queue out of the door most weekend mornings, and Osmosis, the cedar-enzyme bath and spa across the crossroads, takes bookings that people plan trips around. A morning at Osmosis, a stop for bread and an afternoon up in Occidental is a genuinely good ten-mile day.

Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County is 32 to 45 minutes, comfortably the shortest, and worth a connection if the route runs at a workable hour. SFO is 80 to 100 minutes and OAK 85 to 105, both genuine drives rather than hops and both exposed to US-101 traffic through Marin. Whichever you use, the transfer is flat-rate with tolls and standard wait time inside the quoted number, and flight tracking is standard so a late landing moves the pickup automatically.

The luxury Sprinter van, which seats eleven in captain's chairs, is the largest thing we will commit to the road and the village without checking the specific driveway first. Two to four guests ride in the mid-size luxury SUV and up to six in the large luxury SUV. The fourteen-seat Sprinter passenger van and the twenty-four-seat luxury bus are perfectly capable vehicles, but where they can turn around near Occidental is a conversation to have before booking rather than after arriving.

Yes. West from the village, Coleman Valley Road climbs out toward SR-1, and the Bodega Highway out of Freestone is the other way to reach Bodega Bay and the Sonoma Coast. Both are slow, and that is the planning point: treat the drive as part of the day rather than as a transfer between the good bits, and give us the destination when you book so real time goes into the schedule instead of optimism.

Yes, and pre-booking is worth it because a village this size cannot absorb a let-out. We agree a pickup point away from the main flow before the performance and the vehicle is in position when it ends, rather than everyone in the audience discovering at once that ordering a car to Occidental at half past nine is not a fast process. The quoted rate does not change because of the hour or the crowd.

A single leg — the drive out, the ride home, or an airport transfer — is flat-rate and quoted upfront, with tolls, fuel and standard wait time already inside the number and no surge for an inconvenient hour. An evening or a day with several stops in it, which is the usual shape here, is hourly with a daily minimum so the vehicle stays with you between the bakery, the spa, the village and the restaurant. Any winery tasting fees elsewhere in your day are paid directly to those estates and never marked up by us.

Yes, and the venue name is the first thing we need. Ceremony sites in the redwoods around Occidental and along the Bohemian Highway are frequently reached by a single-track drive off a road that is already narrow, so we look at the approach, the gate width and the turnaround before quoting a vehicle. Where a site will not take the twenty-four-seat bus we run staggered Sprinter loops instead, with guests coming up from Sebastopol, Santa Rosa or the coast on one schedule and a single point of contact.

Dispatch is staffed twenty-four hours a day. Village dinners, arts-centre performances and redwood weddings all finish after dark, and the ride down the Bohemian Highway afterwards is exactly the leg worth handing over. A pre-booked chauffeur is the same rate at midnight as at midday because the number is fixed when you reserve. Call (415) 237-0073 whenever the evening actually ends.