Date 37: Calistoga to the comics
After our two-part day in Napa and Calistoga, littlestar and I rounded out our trip with a Sunday that started in Calistoga and ended up at a museum.
Click through to the extended for more.
We started our day with another soak in the hot pool at Dr. Wilkinson's. After this relaxing start, we checked out and wandered onto the main street in Calistoga again, looking for what was, at this point, lunch.
Calistoga's main street, by day
Eschewing the opportunity to try something new, littlestar asked if we could just go back to All Seasons again. It was a fun return trip, as the lunchtime feel of the place was different from the evening Bistro mood. It was a fun, pleasant lunch, with the unseasonal blue skies visible from our table by the front window.
A sunny winter's day in Calistoga
After lunch, we headed for our last stop on this weekend off - the Charles Schulz Museum.
When I was scouting out things to do in the general Napa and Marin areas, I was reminded about this museum. littlestar and I are interested enough in this kind of thing to make the museum worth a stop, but when I checked their site and saw that they were running an exhibit about Beethoven in Peanuts, it made its way onto the "almost certainly" list.
The museum is in Santa Rosa, which is just a windy, pretty drive away from where we were in Calistoga. I drove, as littlestar tried once again, with moderate success, to take pictures of the landscape as it swept by.
Landscape, with complimentary cows
The museum itself sits right next to the Ice Arena that Charles Schulz had built to bring hockey to Santa Rosa, so you're already starting to get a feel for how his life impacted the world around him even before you're in the museum. On the way in, we stopped for a portrait:
littlestar and friend
The museum was fantastic, and littlestar stayed until closing. It's too much to detail - better for us to recommend that you go, instead - but it covers everything from the specifics of the temporary exhibits (such as the Beethoven one) and the course of Charles Schulz's life. We loved the annotated strips that are all over the museum, explaining how parts of Schulz's life fit in with and were reflected in his work. We were both surprised to learn that the music that Schulz drew into the strips featuring Schroeder was not random, instead being chosen to fit the emotion or the humor of the moment, based on Schulz's extensive reading about and listening to major composers.
So we liked it a lot, and kept going until they did that light dimming thing to let us know it was time to go. We'll probably want to go back at some point, too.
The mural is made of 3,588 images from Peanuts strips
From the museum, we wandered over to the ice arena, where we rounded out our day with hot chocolate and an ice cream bar at the Warm Puppy Cafe.
A sweet end to the day