Road trips from Southern California: California wine country

Distance: 498 miles one-way.

It was on my weekly trip to the farmers market that I learned about the Philo Apple Farm Cooking School, 120 miles northwest of San Francisco in the bucolic Anderson Valley wine country. Karen Bates, whose parents founded the French Laundry in Napa Valley in the late 1970s, offers, on the family-run farm, weekend cooking classes that focus on organic, seasonal ingredients. It wasn’t going to be all hard work though. The weekend promised plenty of relaxing, eating and drinking.

-- Phil Zimmerman

(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Aug. 31, 2012 10:52 AM PT

Distance: 483 miles one-way.

From birth in 1965, Sea Ranch, 110 miles north of San Francisco near Gualala, has been a utopian experiment: top-drawer architects building low-key homes -- and a 20-room lodge -- in harmony with a stretch of rugged Northern California coast. Fences, lawns and ostentation are basically banned (although the chapel, pictured, is pretty wild), allowing the landscape to prevail. Hike, bike, ride a horse, play the resort’s links-style golf course or kayak.

Info: Rooms at the 20-unit Sea Ranch Lodge run $169 to $395 nightly ([800] 732-7262). Six agencies handle rental houses, at rates of about $170 to $715 nightly (taxes and cleaning fees included, two-night minimum): Rams Head Realty & Rentals, (800) 785-3455; Coasting Home, (800) 773-8648; Ocean View Properties, (707) 884-3538; Sea Ranch Escape Vacation Home Rentals, (888) 732-7262; Sea Ranch Vacation Rentals, (800) 643-8899; and Beach Rentals, (707) 884-4235.

-- Christopher Reynolds

(Chris Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Distance: 398 miles one-way.

In California, Napa Valley and “wineries” are synonymous. The area also offers a slew of restaurants, splendid rolling hills and Bay Area adjacency. What more is there to say?

Contact: Napa Valley Conference & Visitors Bureau, (707) 226-7459, www.napavalley.org

(Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)

Distance: 430 miles one-way.

Maybe you came here, to the edge of wine country, for some grown-up fun amid the Cabernets and Chardonnays of Napa Valley. But for dessert, you get the house that Charlie Brown built.

Or rather, the museum Charles M. Schulz built. And the ice rink, the coffee shop, the gift shop, the gardens and the baseball field.

Schulz, the father of the “Peanuts” cartoon strip, lived in Sonoma County for more than 40 years, constructing an empire around the hapless Charlie Brown and the irrepressible Snoopy. Within two years of the artist’s death in 2000, the Schulz family had put up the Charles M. Schulz Museum & Research Center here, 56 miles northwest of San Francisco. It gets about 60,000 visitors a year.

-- Christopher Reynolds

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)