Sebastopol strolling

Travel about eight miles west from Santa Rosa, on Highway 12, and you come to the town of Sebastopol. There’s a main drag, with funky boutiques, a good bookstore (Copperfields), and a few restaurants (try West County for a terrific meal!). While it lacks the charm of other Sonoma County towns like Healdsburg or Sonoma itself, it offers utterly delightful surprises. Our favorite: Florence Avenue, a few blocks west of Main Street. You drive through an unassuming neighborhood, then suddenly you’re on a street on which almost every house boasts a folk art junk sculpture by Patrick Amiot–Batman and a mermaid, a fireman and a surfer, a host of whacko characters (including the Mad Hatter) constructed out of odds and ends and painted bright colors. You’ll soon realize that you’ve seen other pieces by Amiot as you drove into town–a giant cow in a field, a gargantuan silver dog at the SPCA entrance. Definitely worth the detour to see! If you can’t make it during the busy bar mitzvah weekend, check out this Youtube video.

Farm trails: beyond the vines

One of the great pleasures of living where we do is the ability to be “locavores” (people who eat only locally grown products). We try the best we can, and enjoy local farmers markets and our weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box delivery.

Isaac’s Bar Mitzvah weekend just happens to be the Weekend Along Farm Trails, two days of activities (10am-5pm) you might be able to catch between bar mitzvah events.

Wine Tasting 101

Here’s the easiest (and closest) wine tour through the Valley of the Moom:

Take Highway 12 east towards Sonoma. Your first stop will be in Kenwood, about 15 minutes outside of Santa Rosa, where Tom ran the Kenwood Foot Race 10K on the 4th of July (he took 14 minutes off his personal best–yeah Tom!). The race is “the oldest, most prestigious road race in Sonoma County, a 4th of July tradition for 37 years… follow[ing] scenic rural roads in the heart of the Wine Country…. a challenging loop with rolling hills.”

Our two favorite tasting experiences there are Kenwood Vineyards (the tasting, which always includes good table reds, is still in the barn like it has been for about 30 years!) and Chateau St. Jean (long known for its whites, and sporting a lovely garden, an expensive deli, and a nice shop). Chateau St. Jean is part of a number of wineries that were started in the 1970s by unlikely vintners who held day jobs as doctors and dentists, experienced success in various wine competitions, then sold to the highest corporate bidder.

Onward to Glen Ellen, to Benzinger Family Winery. Here, the kids can take a tram ride (in general, there’s not a whole lot for kids to do on wine tours!). Notable for the fact that the family still runs the place; some Benzinger offspring or in-law is probably pouring your taste of wine. And while the wine gets mixed reviews, Glen Ellen makes for an enjoyable stop–especially if you have time to go up to Jack London State Historic Park, and take an easy walk up to the ill-fated Wolf House (it burned to its stone skeleton just before moving day!). London wrote Call of the Wild and White Fang, and was known not only as a writer but as an adventurer and socialist. There’s a great little museum there, housed in “The House of Happy Walls,” where London’s widow lived after his death.

Near Glen Ellen, you’ll pass Beltane Ranch, where we got married, and also the home (look for the small white house with the large arched window) of the late M.F.K. Fisher, the food writer (a New York Times critic wrote, “Her food writing read like love stories”).

The full tour takes you on into Sonoma, where there are several wineries to choose from, including historic ones like Buena Vista and Sebastiani. Usually, it’s enough to just visit the town itself and its beautiful central square, complete with duck pond, play structures, and surrounding shops and food opportunities. Try Sonoma Cheese factory for lots and lots of free tastings (mostly variations of Sonoma Jack), or Basque Boulangerie (great breads, sandwiches and salads). Grab something to eat, then sit in the green and cool park. There are a couple of great ice cream stops as well, plus fine dining like The Girl in the Fig. Our favorite store: The Sign of the Bear kitchenware. You can also visit the Sonoma mission and look inside historic buildings.

Problem with any wine tour these days: most wineries now charge for limited tastings! You can share a glass, of course, or you can try to find lists online of who pours for free (there was recently such a list in one of the newspapers we read, and we’ll keep looking for it!). Let us know what you find and we’ll post it here.

Spa splendor

As you might imagine, given our location in the midst of one of the finest wine producing areas of the world, Santa Rosa and the surrounding area offers a full range of hedonistic delights. Perhaps on your trip you might sneak in a visit to one of our many spas! In our neighborhood, they come in a wide variety of styles: here are three suggestions to consider (all require reservations).

The Hyatt Vineyard Creek, where we’ve held a block of rooms, offers full in-house spa services. These read like a tasting menu, which includes Merlot Grapeseed Scrub, Chardonnay and Pomegranate Soak, and Lavender Body Butter Massage. We have no personal experience to report here, but the location is sure convenient.

If you’re willing to venture further afield, we can recommend our favorite, Osmosis, locate in west county (synonymous here with “laid back,” “left over hippie,” and definitely “hedonistic”). The drive out to Freestone alone, along Bodega Highway, is enough to relax you: rolling hills (the kind that inspired Christo to create “Running Fence”), contented cows, and, in the summer particularly, the first hints of ocean air. Osmosis is located in a converted Victorian house and surrounded by a wonderful, calming Japanese garden. If you indulge in the full treatment, you (this is best done two by two) start by being served a special enzyme tea while seated in a private room with a view out to the beautiful garden, then take a “bath” in a wooden tub “filled with a fragrant blend of finely ground cedar, rice bran, and plant enzymes imported from Japan. These ingredients heat naturally, by fermentation, creating biologically generated warmth that mimics the body’s natural metabolic process.”  In other words, it’s a lot like being buried up to the neck in a clean compost pile–but don’t let that turn you off!  You’ll feel heated from the inside out; you relax while looking out into another section of the garden (which you can walk in later); an attendant brings you cool water and gracefully wipes the sweat off your brow. Afterwards, you have to scrape and shower off all the bran and cedar bits; then you can have a massage. By the end, you won’t feel a bone in your body, your skin will feel totally refreshed, and you’ll be ready for the indulgences available at the Wild Flour Bread Bakery across the street–the most amazing bread, fresh out of the oven (and lots of free tastes!).

The classic spa indulgence is available over the hill in Calistoga. The name is an amalgam of “California” and “Saratoga,” which may give you a hint of how old a spa town this is (the first baths opened in the 1860s). This is the source of the ubiquitous “Calistoga water,” which was long held to have medicinal qualities. It’s an interesting small town: while catering to visitors, it still feels like a real town, since it serves a large portion of the workers who tend the vineyards throughout the Napa Valley. There are a number of places to have a mud bath; the practice is said to have originated with the Mayacamas Indians. The New York Times lists Indian Springs, Dr. Wilkinson’s Hot Springs Resort or Golden Haven. We haven’t been in years, since we have been wooed away by Osmosis, but we always loved the experience in the past.

Where the deer, giraffe and zebra play

One of the surprises in Santa Rosa is Safari West, a private African wildlife preserve about 25 minutes from our house. Unless you’re coming early or staying late, taking the jeep tour probably won’t fit into the bar mitzvah weekend schedule (you need at least two hours), but you may want to consider it as part of your next visit to us! It’s a beautiful place–a wine country version of an African savannah–and as you bump along you discover small herds of gazelle, oryx, giraffe, zebra, and a range of oddball deer (there are about 400 animals). There are also some primates, exotic birds, and a cheetah. It’s all pretty laid back rather than zoo-like, and great fun. They even have snazzy tent cabins up there, so you can wake up, look out the window, and see a giraffe looking back at you. You might catch a glimpse of baby Jiggs (seen here), born June 14. A couple of years ago, when a baby zebra was born near the road, traffic backed up for miles–how many times have you had a chance to see a newborn zebra on your way home from work?

McDonald and the Movies

McDonald Avenue is arguably the most beautiful street in Santa Rosa: quiet, tree-lined, and full of wonderful big old houses. It is THE place in town for Halloween, when the trees drop their fall leaves, residents decorate their houses and set up gory scenes on their front lawns, families fill the sidewalks and thousands of pieces of candy are acquired and consumed. And it’s a beautiful place to take a walk any time of year–the streets around it are officially designated the McDonald Historic District. Tom used to deliver mail there (though this photo is not of Tom!), and Isaac and I would often meet him there to enjoy the walk. Nearby is Isaac’s elementary school, Proctor Terrace, and the street eventually meanders past the rural cemetary (more on that in another post). If you choose to walk there, you’re also near the Town and Country center that hosts a bakery, a coffee bar and Carmen’s Burger Bar (see earlier post), should you need a pitstop.

The largest house on Mcdonald Avenue is the McDonald Mansion. According to About.com:

McDonald Mansion (a.k.a. Mableton Mansion) is Santa Rosa’s most prominent historic home. The 14,000-square-foot house was built in the late 1870s by Col. Mark Lindsay McDonald, owner of Santa Rosa’s water company, builder of the Santa Rosa Street Railway and one of the town’s most eminent early citizens. He had it built in a style to evoke the plantations along the Mississippi. The National Register of Historic Places, in which the mansion is recorded, lists the style as Stick-Eastlake, a type of Victorian architecture.

Back in McDonald’s day, many notable visitors came to the house, including Mark Twain, and railroad magnates Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker. In 1960, the mansion was used as the home in Walt Disney’s Pollyanna, a classic film about a perpetually optimistic young girl.

In addition to Pollyanna, the street has been the site for three other films: two versions of Shadow of a Doubt and Wes Craven’s Scream. Hitchcock used the interiors as well as the exteriors of the house shown here–wartime rationing meant there was no wood to build separate sets, as was his custom. The 1991 Hallmark Hall of Fame remake had to use the house across the street.

Click on this link for a piece from the San Francisco Chronicle about McDonald Avenue and the movies.

Peanuts, Anyone?

Did you know…that for 30 years Santa Rosa was the home of Charles Schulz, creator of Charlie Brown and Snoopy? We have “Snoopy’s home ice,” the Redwood Ice Arena, a rink built, according to legend, so that Schulz’s daughter could learn to skate, and site of an annual holiday ice show, senior hockey tournament, endless birthday parties–and, long ago, tennis matches! Schultz used to be a regular at the cafe there, the Warm Puppy. Across the street is the Charles M. Schulz Museum, which includes Schulz’s studio and changing exhibits of cartoon art. Three exhibits will be on display in September: Baseball as Allegory, Political Peanuts, and Schultz’s Beethoven: Schroeder’s Muse (check their website at http://www.schulzmuseum.org/).

Without even trying, you can’t miss the influence of Peanuts. For the last few summers, local artists have decorated statues of Snoopy on his doghouse, Woodstock in a tree, Joe Cool, and, of course, Charlie Brown himself; after their display around town, they were auctioned for charity. Many remain in front of the businesses that purchased them. A good place to view several of them is Railroad Square, aka lower (west of Hwy 101) Fourth Street. Two stand in front of one of our favorite breakfast places, the Omelette Express.

While you’re in Railroad Square, don’t miss the train station at the western end of the street. This is the setting for a scene from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, which was filmed in Santa Rosa (we’ll give some more Hitchcock recommendations along the way). Here is where Joseph Cotton arrived and was greeted by Theresa Wright. The station now houses a visitors’ information center. Check out the Charlie Brown bronze at the corner, a tribute to Schulz, and if the station is open, take your small child to play with the electric train inside.