NOVEMBER 06 (Cont'd)
Mid-way through a sunny Thursday afternoon, we arrived at the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa and, eight years after our first attempt at visiting, on that disappointing Tuesday which was the only day that we were in town, we finally found it open to the public and went inside to be greeted by some of the most enthusiastic museum staff that it has ever been my pleasure to interact with.
After giving us a joyous welcome, and shared tales of their own adventures in visiting England, we entered the mail hall which is dominated by a large ceramic mural of Charlie Brown and Lucy and the famous football image, and another wooden one depicting Snoopy in his various guises, both designed for the museum by Yoshiteru Otani.
The staff may very well have been a little bored because one of them positively fell over himself to offer us the opportunity to have our pictures taken in front of the great mural and outside on a park bench being fed cookies by Snoopy and Woodstock, before leaving us to explore the video room, garden (including a "Kite Eating Tree", a huge baseball hat pagoda, and the laser fountain), and exhibition rooms, one of which was being worked in for an exhibition that started "next week", for which they constantly apologised.
Of course, for an old and rather lapsed scribbler like myself, seeing some of the original artworks on display on the walls and in the exhibition cases was just as exciting as seeing the Mona Lisa might be to other artists, and that was rather ironic given that, just a couple of blocks away in the Snoopy Gift Shop, a completely different Mona Lisa actually hangs.
Upstairs there are more original strips, alongside some of "Sparky's" earlier works, as well as a replica of the studio in which he worked for many years on his comic strips, and, dotted around the walls were tiny images of Woodstock and other characters sitting just above the skirting boards giving the whole place a rather loveable atmosphere which seems only right given the uplifting and positive nature of the original strip cartoons themselves.
Because, as well as being endlessly talented and witty, he was a very forward-thinking and inclusive chap was old "Sparky", as the strip reproduced at the top of this page shows, and many of those four-panelled masterpieces (other, longer Sunday Supplement strips were also created) can still make me laugh out loud.
Now, I've always been a huge fan of the "Peanuts" comic strips, so going there really was a bit of a "must" for me and I really was not disappointed, and, of course, I just had to visit the little gift shop and get myself one of those ceramic tiles to take home with me, even though we fretted endlessly about it breaking in transit and I still don't really know what I'm going to do with it now that I have it.
Heading back out into the sunshine, we headed over to the more "commercial" gift shop before going for a sandwich and soda in the "Warm Puppy" Coffee Shop which is attached to the Ice Rink that Mr Schulz built in Santa Rosa and upon which he even played a game or two of Ice Hockey in his time.
The cafe was full of concerned mothers looking on as several coaches trained their beloved children in the gentle art of Ice Skating and, whilst that seemed to this jaded old head to be a very odd thing for any of them to be doing, it probably made a lot more sense to them.
Those sandwiches, by the way, turned out to be a plenteous enough meal to make us not really feel that it was necessary to venture out into Santa Rosa again that evening once we'd checked in at a motel that Trip Advisor assured us was not full of "Whores and Crack Dealers", and so, after our lavish meal at one of the finest restaurants in Mendocino the previous evening, we found ourselves drinking a half bottle of Pinot Noir that we'd picked up at the Cheese Factory in Sonoma, accompanied by a huge bag of salted potato chips.
"It really is full of variety, this journey…" we thought.
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