Fifty First States: Day 17 – Good Grief, That Was Close!

It took forever to get going this morning. Joe insisted on catching up on trailers, I shouldn’t really complain as I’m normally the one hogging the laptop, but this is not a morning job, especially as he then insisted on getting an oil change…It was an odd reversal for me to be the one hounding on about keeping to the schedule, but I had good reason as this was a rare day where we had to get somewhere before a certain time!

After getting the real life stuff out of the way, we put our tourist hats back on and made the short drive to Historic Ferndale. This was a flyby visit as there really wasn’t much there. We wanted to stop by as we had discovered it was where the Jim Carrey movie ‘The Majestic’ was filmed and we just had to see the theatre. It didn’t really have much razzle-dazzle, so it was a bit disappointing.

A little more satisfying was the Avenue of the Giants. We’d been nicely introduced to the massive redwoods of California yesterday, but today we got more time to play in the trees.

The Avenue is a lot of fun and I wish we’d had longer to explore as we didn’t get to see some of the more well-known landmarks on the scenic drive. It was such a contrast to some of the roads we’ve been on lately. Instead of seeing for miles and miles, here the trees tower over you blocking out the sun.

Back out into the sunshine we grabbed some lunch and discovered not just that lunchables make a filling and cheap meal, but that northern California is full of hippies. They were everywhere; mostly trying to hitch a lift. I don’t think so, buddy, we don’t keep granola bars in our car for a reason! A more pleasant sight was the surrounding vineyards - Yep we’ve entered wine country and to honor this fact we’ve added in an unscheduled detour tomorrow (expect that in the next post!).

Our last stop of the day, and the reason for our rushing, was the Charles M. Schultz Museum. We arrived at 4.15 with only 45 minutes to spare. Unfortunately this was our only chance to go as they’re not open Tuesdays, so we had to fly through the exhibits.

As you can probably guess from the pictures, Charles M. Schultz was the creator of the cartoon strip ‘Peanuts’. Seeing as I have my very own Charlie Brown - who at one time happened to live on the same street in St. Paul that Schultz had lived on - it was a perfect stop for us!

It was interesting to find out there was an actual Charlie Brown and that all the names in the strip were taken from real friends. ‘Peanuts’ actually debuted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1950, but back then it was called ‘Lil’ Folks’ and it turns out Schultz never even liked the name Peanuts – a title change forced upon him when the cartoon was picked up in newspapers nationally. I would have found that last fact sad, until I discovered he made 1.1 billion dollars during his lifetime from it…surely that softened the creative blow a little?