Travel and Adventure: Mendocino and the color purple

California mendocino County caps Sonoma like a cork, about 90 miles north of San Francisco. Rural, breathtaking and abundant, 90,000 inhabit this sparsely populated, rolling landscape composed of six fertile valleys. About the size of Rhode Island, it is a farming and ranching Eden that has embraced counterculture lifestyles and given birth to an active artistic community. The town of Mendocino, which sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, was once the busiest port in California.