San Clemente and all of South Orange County, CA has GOT to be one of the world’s greatest places to live.  Not only do we have the ocean a couple good Tiger Woods drives away from where we live on Camino Capistrano in North San Clemente, but it is also about 20 degrees cooler in the summer than, say, Irvine is.  Plus, we are about 6 degrees warmer than inland during the winter.

Most people have to drive across much of Orange County to reach the beach.  Not us!  We San Clemente, Dana Point, Laguna Niguel, Capistrano Beach residents just happen to own real estate here that’s literally MINUTES from the beach.

And what beaches we have, too.  We have several state beaches within a few minutes drive of each other, and many county and city beaches, plus many city parks right by the ocean.

Then there’s the two ocean gems that everyone here just loves….the nearly quarter-mile-long wooden pier in San Clemente, and the fabulous yacht harbor in Dana Point.

While perhaps not WORLD-class attractions, both of these sites overwhelm you with their inherent style, beauty and grace.

When my Realtor/Broker wife, Debbie Ferrari,  has out-of-area home buyers visiting here and she is driving them around showing them the area, she ALWAYS shows them the incredibly lovely pier and harbor.

She especially makes a point of driving them up that steep hill that traverses the cliff in Dana Point Harbor.  You end up at the top near the Chart House and from there the view of the harbor below is so stunning that it almost seems like a surreal Disney set for a movie.

I will report periodically on more aspects of Orange County life, but visually, it’s hard to beat the San Clemente pier and the Dana Point Harbor to represent truly exquisite sites to make our real estate even MORE valuable….!!!!!

In the San Clemente, CA area, you just cannot find a better selection of wine or spirits than you can here:

Bob’s Fine Wines
470 Camino De Estrella, San Clemente, 92672 -

(949) 496-3313

Not only is the place stacked floor to ceiling (well, almost) with the region’s most carefully selected wines from the esoteric and rare, to wines from lesser aging and culture.

Rob, the owner, is the guy who does the first big wine booth each year as you head for the pool area at the big “Taste of San Clemente” event at the Tennis Club just off Calle del Cerro.  Likely, you cannot stump him about wines and he is there most days.

At night, another great Oenophile, Nolan, takes over, and he, too, knows his rare and common wines.  They are also some of the nicest guys you will ever know and are always in a good mood.

The store also has a wide choice of spirits, candy, soft drinks—even exotic kinds of root beer and ginger ale (I LOVE ginger ale, so does my husband, Bill Koelzer)

So, next time you are having the boss over for dinner, or hosting a party or a real estate open house for Realtors somewhere in Orange County, drop by Bob’s Fine Wines first and tell Rob or Nolan that you read about it here.

Bill drove around today taking dozens of photos of agent’s yard signs and discovered something very important.  In most cases, the big realty chains that provide “company” yard signs for free or at a discount want agents to use ones that devote more than half the advertising area to the company—not to the agent.’

Now we all know that people buy real estate from an agent and not from a company; in fact, when they choose me to help them buy a house, they often ask me—after the fact—what company I’m with.

Well, I am sure that an agent has more credibility being with a large national firm like Prudential California Realty, Coldwell-Banker, Century 21 or Re/Max, but that does not mean that these firms should take up half the space on the yard sign.

My husband, Bill Koelzer, is writing a column right now on this subject.  To see some of the photos he took that show the good, the bad, and the ugly of Realtor yard signs, take a look at this.

How do you do your Real estate signs?  Do you just take signs of a particular design or format that the Broker or company gives you or recommends, or do you go out and design your own signs?  Ideally, ones that give YOU more room to talk about yourself and your contact info than the company gets?

Lemme know…gimme some comments on this…do a post now on this important subject, since yard signs are one of the world’s best way to get new real estate listings.

My husband, Bill, slipped into the new Sonoma Restaurant— which hasn’t really even opened yet…but will, tonight, Saturday.

He he talked to the owner, Raymond, who has had restaurants previously in Boston. Nice guy and the restaurant has a TOTALLY DIFFERENT and upscale look from what West of Five had before…

It has a VERY NICE bar and both a formal and informal side of the restaurant, since they have white tablecloth haute cuisine seating on the dining side and beautiful tables for seating on the bar side, plus many bar stools.

Nice balanced menu of meats, fishes, pasta and a big fat wine list….I think it will be a choice for classier dining in San Clemente right on the heels of classy The Melting Pot, located not a half mile away by the Krikorian Restauran, and White Horses down on Victoria Street near the San Clemente pier.

Olamendi’s Mexican Restaurant

Tonight we took my 86-year-old mother, Lillian, to Olamendi’s Express restaurant at 806 E Avenida Pico # A, San Clemente, CA.

Olamendi’s always has good food, their chips are very thin, crisp and tasty, their salsa is top notch and the carnitas pork is cooked in orange juice so that it is always tender and sweet. Mom and I had chicken tostadas and Bill had a carnitas tostado grande. All excellent and generous.

(Olemundi has another location on Pacific Coast Highway in Capistrano Beach, a place that is packed most evenings and which does a lot of wedding party business, too.)

After dinner, we drove a few yards over to the Golden Spoon yogurt restaurant where Lillian insisted that she buy a pint of Mounds bar flavor for herself and a quart for us. Their yogurt has only 68 calories and 15 carbohydrates per 4 ounces. Each visit they stamp a card you keep and on your ninth visit you can get a free quart, pint, sundae, or whatever.

Our good friend, mortgage loan expert Mike Munzig is always on top of the latest home sales statistics for Orange County.

Go check out the figures for January 2007 by GOING HERE.

San Clemente, Calififornia’s former Mayor, Susan Ritschel, joined my husband Bill Koelzer and I for lunch today at Carbonara’s Italian Trattoria Restaurant.

We covered the many ways that I could support the completion of the proposed Dorothy Visser Senior Center in San Clemente, to replace the old senior center. Susan is the Chairperson for the project, as well as being on the Board of the San Deigo Water Authority which includes San Clemente.

We have already made a webpage in my site on the Dorothy Visser Senior Center which has a great deal of helpful info. Later we will imbed more links to the OFFICIAL Senior Center site once it is live.

And Susan Ritschel is improving the Dorothy Visser Senior Center site over the next month to provide more resources for seniors as well as updates on the new Center’s progress. To visit that site, Go Here.

There are many extraordinary services in Orange County that help seniors.

For real estate and housing, it’s
Orange County Community Services.

These links below offer many resources:
Orange County Office on Aging

See South Orange County Services:

Legal Aid Society–free legal advice

Seniors Free Transportation by OCTA

Our goal is to create many pages and links in my site to San Clemente non-profit organizations as a way to give back to our community. I got the idea when last night I, and about 20 others, were honored at “Community Leadership Night” at the Orange County Board of Realtors.”

In addition, the South Orange County Web site, South OC Buzz just named me Volunteer of the Month for March, an honor for which I am most grateful. (My community service is recounted on my website here.)