Bustin’ out in northern California wine country

Wine-weary visitors to Northern California have a friend in Sonoma County.

It’s not that wine isn’t important here—it surely is with more than 200 active wineries—but people don’t get into a lather over wine or the wine lifestyle like the folks next door in Napa.

The county’s official web site has a page that says it all: “Sonoma County is much more than wine.”

Indeed it is.

This city is 60 kilometres north of San Francisco, a straight shot up U.S. Highway 101. Use it as the base for your wine break.

From here, you can head west through the Russian River Valley to Pacific Coast beaches, north to the tony shops of Healdsburg, south to the historic old mission town of Sonoma and even east, to Calistoga in Napa Valley via the mountain-pass roads.

There’s a lot you can do in Sonoma County, from watching a drag race on Wednesday nights at the Infineon Raceway at Sears Point in Sonoma to ogling the animals at Safari West Wildlife Preserve outside Santa Rosa to touring the site of an old Russian colony at Ft. Ross State Historic Park to savoring the fresh foods at the Healdsburg Farmers Market (Saturday mornings beginning May 2, Tuesday afternoons beginning June 2).

Check the Sonoma County Tourism Bureau Web site, sonoma county.com, for more ideas.

For me, there are three Sonoma must-do’s:

Charles M. Schulz

Museum

Good grief! An entire museum dedicated to the man behind the Peanuts comic strip? Yes. And it’s great fun for all ages.

Exhibits include a replica of Schulz’s studio, Snoopy’s doghouse wrapped by the artist Christo and even the nursery wall painted by Schulz in 1951.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the museum itself is a giant mural of Charlie Brown and a football-holding Lucy created by Japanese artist Yoshiteru Otani.

The mural was fashioned out of 3,588 2-by-5-inch ceramic tiles emblazoned with 10 years worth of daily “Peanuts” comic strips. Each reproduced strip is readable.

Schulz lived in Santa Rosa until his death in 2000. The museum is in his old neighbourhood, across the street from his famous hockey rink, the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, and its restaurant, the Warm Puppy Cafe.

You can really feel his spirit here.

This Sonoma museum is quite kid-friendly, but there is plenty of fodder here for older children and adults.

The exhibits take a topical and sometimes off-beat approach to the Peanuts phenomenon.

“Laughter is the best medicine,” for example, offers 70 comic strips in which Charlie Brown and his friends cope with broken limbs, nervous stomachs, lazy eye and dieting.

It runs through Aug. 3. Another special exhibit, “To the Moon: Snoopy Soars with NASA,” examines the history of Apollo 10 and the comic strip’s involvement in the May 1969 flight ‘round the moon. It runs though July 20.

Luther Burbank Home & Gardens

Lois Ruggero has to be a patient woman. The native of Oak Park, Ill., who moved west in the 1950s, works as a volunteer at the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens.

“Luther who?” you might ask her. You wouldn’t be the first.

“A lot of people tell me they’ve never heard about him,” Ruggero said. “They don’t realize how famous he was. Ford and Edison came here to visit him.”

And so they should have, if you ask me. The great automobile pioneer and the inventor of the electric light must stand aside for Burbank, the man who developed the potato used to make most of today’s french fries.

This potato, known as the russet Burbank, was a mutation of the Burbank potato that the botanist had developed earlier.

At the time, the russet Burbank was thought of as “a freak of nature.”

Inventing the french-fry potato would be enough for most men, but Burbank was renowned for so much more.

Through cross-breeding, hybridization and grafting, he introduced scores of new plant varieties, including: Shasta daisies; the “plumcot,” a cross between the apricot and the plum; and spineless cacti. There’s a monstrously large cactus specimen in the garden.

You learn all about Burbank and his miracles of botany but not oppressively so on a quick, 40-minute tour of the property.

Sonoma Coast State Park

California likes to hype its coastline as the setting for one endless beach party. Don’t believe it up here.

When I lived in San Francisco, there would be occasional news reports of shark attacks, families swept out to sea by rogue waves, and hapless motorists pinned to the base of cliffs for three days after their cars veered off coastal highways.

To me, the beach held out not the possibility of a golden tan but a gruesome death.

And it’s cold. So cold the Coppertone gal would turn blue from exposure.

Still, the beaches of Sonoma County are beautiful.

Wild, rugged, seemingly always deserted, they evoke an image of an earlier California unsettled and rather unsettling in its epic scale.

The tiny coastal towns have their restaurants and coffee shops, of course, but I prefer to stop by a deli, order a sandwich on the go (shrimp, avocado and bacon on sourdough is a favorite) and head out to some beachfront bluff to soak in the scene.

One of my favourite beaches is Goat Rock Beach, just outside Jenner near the mouth of the Russian River. The view is panoramic, and the signature feature is Goat Rock, a massive outcropping sticking into the water.