The Other Valley

My mother has been visiting for a little over a week. She's been here before and seen most of the major tourist attractions, so we have been choosing some of the more engaging B-level sites to explore during this visit. Last week that took us up to Lake Tahoe and Reno. We also toured the home of Leland Stanford, one-time governor of California, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, and founder of Stanford University. All of this was fairly familiar to me and interesting to her.

But over the weekend we embarked upon the unknown. We ventured into the Sonoma valley wine country.

Of course, Sonoma is pretty well-known amongst wine drinkers, but it has always been overshadowed by its more famous neighbor, Napa. Darling Wife and I have toured Napa on numerous occasions with just about every houseguest we've had. They all want to go to Napa. And it is a short freeway ride from our house, so of course we indulge them. Certainly Napa is set up for tourism. It has wine snobs, wine trains, wine buses, wine limos, and vineyards that are more like amusement parks than wineries, some of them even charging $20-$30 just to let you through the gates.

Sonoma has its fair share of elaborate wineries too, but it is a little less popular, therefore, less crowded and less flashy. It also has much more than just wineries. It has some pretty cool history. The town itself has a plaza/square packed with buildings from the 1800's, including the last and northernmost mission on the Mission Trail, aka El Camino Real.
These missions, constructed by a joint-venture of the Catholic church and the Spanish government over a period of about 150 years, cover eleven of the southwestern states. They have always fascinated me, but I've never actually been to one until now.

Then we toured the adjacent Spanish fort and the nearby home of General Mariano Vallejo, who once owned most of northern California and was instrumental in the "Bear Flag Incident" that made California a US state.

Finally, we dropped in to visit Jack London and the ruins of his "Wolf House."

There was definitely a "call of the wild" about the place, and I can understand why the location appealed to London. It was also a little eerie, but perhaps that had to do with the approaching night. We had to leave without sifting through the manuscripts in the museum or seeing the small house where he wrote most of his famous works.

Perhaps we will return to this "other" valley on some future excursion to drink in the beauty of the land and its famed liquid and to commune with the spirits of the dead.