“They made it up the mountain,” Reagan wrote, “but when they got to our home, it was so foggy no one could see more than a few feet. Most people - including me - would have said, “Forget it. This was when I especially admired the queen’s grit. Our people met them with four-wheel-drive cars.” At three places the road was cut by streams and their limousines couldn’t get through.

In his autobiography, Reagan wrote: “We waited at the ranch for while they struggled seven miles up a switchback road. Boulders rolled through rampaging waters. I rode in a press pool car behind the president’s four-wheel drive Chevrolet Suburban up the narrow, twisting 7.2-mile road from Refugio State Beach Park on Highway 101 to his 2,400-foot-high retreat. It had rained 4 inches with gale-force winds at Reagan’s ranch during the previous 24 hours. California was pelted by one of those once-a-decade winter storms that turn shallow creeks into cascading torrents and wash out roads and bridges. Horseback riding was a passion they shared.īut nature interfered. The highlight was to be their riding horses around the hilly spread, as they had during his earlier visit to Windsor Castle. The queen’s entire 10-day trip had been planned around the president’s desire to show off his 688-acre Rancho del Cielo. “There were toasts and I said, ‘I know I promised Nancy a lot when we were married, but how can I ever top this?’” Reagan recalled in his autobiography, “An American Life.” She was serenaded by Frank Sinatra and Perry Como at a star-studded 20th Century Fox banquet, attended a state dinner hosted by Reagan at San Francisco’s De Young Museum, worshiped in a rustic, century-old Yosemite Valley chapel and celebrated the Reagans’ 31st wedding anniversary with a private candlelight dinner aboard the royal yacht Britannia. About 30 years later, President Reagan invited the queen to visit his home state - and more precisely, his beloved mountaintop ranch just north of Santa Barbara. She always had, ever since as a teen I watched the 27-year-old’s coronation in all its glittering pomp and circumstances on our family’s first TV, a 16-inch black and white. The queen fascinated me on that California tour. Jerry Brown at the state Capitol in 1977.

And the then-prince showed it while being hosted by “era of limits” Gov. Her son and successor, King Charles III, shared his mother’s attribute of staying calm and cool. She had grace and grit - lifelong characteristics that were brightly displayed on a venturous trip to California in 1983. But Queen Elizabeth II was one monarch most Americans respected and admired.

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