Make the state of California home for any number of years and you'll eventually find yourself pulling off the highway alongside one of the Golden state's 21 historic missions at some moment in time. Especially the year your offspring hits Fourth Grade and all of a sudden all the many dust-layered mysteries of the early Spanish -dominated days of the West are revealed!
Fast approaching the end of Fourth Grade with my youngest of three, I thought I'd seen and heard all that there was to take in around the Bay Area mission trail. Sonoma and San Rafael being just a half hour drive, the missions are major cultural landmarks around here, with plenty of annual modern-day fiestas to repeatedly draw a bustling local and out-of-town crowd.
But the three-year-old California Mission Museum at Cline Cellars over on Arnold Drive, in Sonoma, had somehow eluded any of our previous historical field trips around the county. And so, it came as a pleasant surprise that today's Fourth-Grade foray over Stage Gulch Pass was headed in the general direction of Cline's picture-perfect, vintage estate and not onto the city plaza for the umpteenth trek around the Sonoma mission and barracks themselves.
Pulling onto the property, alongside leafy, flourishing rows of vines, and the famous Cline Red Truck, duck ponds and the classic original farmhouse tasting room, the non-profit foundation of the California Missions Museum program is peacefully tucked away at the back of the scenic, tree-lined property.
It's the only way to take in all 21 of the missions in one sweet, air-conditioned mini-tour and what a collection of missions they are. For back in 1998, the Cline family created the museum as a fitting showcase for a collection of historic treasures, originally built for the 1939 World's Fair at San Francisco's Treasure Island.
Under the direction of Italian artist Leon Bayard de Volo, the miniature scale missions were constructed by German master cabinet makers. Considered as extraordinarily accurate depictions of each mission's original shape, size and structure, the missions were made of wood, clay, glass, cast iron, paperboard and real plant material.
After sitting in storage for many years, the impressive and long-forgotten mission collection came up for auction ten years ago. In addition to the model collection, the Cline family has featured a life-size figure of Father Junipero Serra, mission paintings and two stained glass window panels originally housed in Mission Dolores in SF, prior to the 1906 earthquake.
The museum is free of charge, though groups and classes are required to make reservations ahead of a visit. Hours of opening are 9.30am to 4.pm during the school year and 11.00am to 4.pm during the summer. Positioned at 24737 Arnold Drive, a family outing to the California Mission Museum would not go amiss with a little wine tasting for the non-driving grown-ups in tow! Picnic benches are in abundance out by the ponds behind the tasting room, and turtles, ducks, caged chickens, pheasants, bantams and all sorts of other birds are bound to keep the kids enthralled while you contemplate the merits of an educational outing at a winery!
Of course it was a bottled water type of trip today, what with being designated driver of a car load of ten year olds, and all, but you can bet your bottom dollar that next time I'm on the property, I'll be pouring myself a nice glass of Cline's incredible Ancient Vines Mourvedre.
Did you know that dozens of acres of Cline grapes are grown within the Petaluma Gap micro-climate and make up a considerable portion of many a fine Cline wine?
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