Watching the Birdies

PETALUMA, Calif. — The newspaper blurb on the B&B; in Petaluma was intriguing: “Elegantly restored Victorian home on 600 acres, a working cattle ranch. Great breakfast, bird-watching. Rates: $110-$150.” I grabbed my friend Ann, an avid birder, and said, “Let’s go!”

I’d been to the wine country north of San Francisco once, years ago, but never to Petaluma, in southern Sonoma County near the Marin County border. From my first trip, I remembered expensive, rather twee inns and sophisticated restaurants where “rich” aptly described the cream sauces and the prices. Could there be a down-home alternative to all this? The Chileno Valley Ranch Bed & Breakfast looked like a candidate.

In May, Ann and I flew into Oakland, figuring to avoid the Friday afternoon traffic snarl in San Francisco, and picked up our rental car. About 90 easy minutes later, driving through green hills dotted with trees, we pulled up to the gabled, two-story inn, 10 1/2 miles southwest of Petaluma. On the porch, the resident dogs--Max the English springer spaniel and Lacy the golden retriever--sprawled snoozing in the afternoon sun.

Innkeeper Sally Gale soon stepped out to greet us in stockinged feet (to spare the redwood floors, she said). Slender, soft-spoken and friendly, her gray-streaked hair pulled back into a practical ponytail, she was low-key country personified. In fact, her Petaluma roots go back five generations.

Gale inherited the farm in the 1980s, and after living in Hawaii and raising her three children there, she and husband Mike returned to the mainland in 1993 to fulfill a dream: restoring the abandoned farmhouse. It soon opened as a B&B;, and a year ago the couple started up the ranch with 41 head of beef cattle.

The inn itself is spacious and unfussy, decorated with old Hawaiian engravings. Our second-floor room was refreshingly un-chintzed: two antique four-poster double beds with powder-blue feather comforters, a bay window with simple white lace curtains. There are four guest rooms in the house, plus a separate cottage with kitchen in the former creamery.

We soon felt like family. Perhaps that’s because Ann may be family. While chatting, Ann and Sally discovered they have surnames in common on their Italian Swiss family trees. And so we learned that Petaluma (population 50,400), once known as “The World’s Egg Basket” (now it’s more dairy and beef), is quite an Italian Swiss enclave. In keeping with that spirit, Ann and I headed into town to Volpi’s Ristorante for dinner--a boisterous family-owned place with red-checked plastic tablecloths.

We shamelessly stuffed ourselves. Ann’s $18.95 “family-style meal” included saltimbocca (veal with sage, prosciutto and mozzarella) with asparagus and mashed potatoes, sourdough bread, clam chowder, salad, pasta with cream sauce, ice cream and coffee. I ordered fettuccine with prawns in marinara sauce. Not haute cuisine, but good, solid cooking.

Back at the inn, sleep was a challenge for us. The Gales had corralled their cattle to cull several for sale to brokers, causing a cacophony of bovine discontent into the night. The next day, the Gales apologized and promised to push that chore to a weekday next time.

Early Saturday, while Ann slept in, I hiked out to the ranch’s creek, shod in rubber boots that the Gales keep by the door for wandering guests. There I spotted red-winged blackbirds and ducks. Later in my stay, I entered the unused barn, an antique worthy of an Andrew Wyeth painting, and startled a resident barn owl, which stretched its enormous wings and swooped along the rafters.

Over a breakfast of banana-nut and peach-almond muffins, pancakes, eggs and mixed fruit, served family style, we met the other guests: elderly birders from San Diego and young couples from Roseville, Ukiah and even Petaluma itself (the latter fleeing floor-sanding at home). Then, joined by a former colleague and friend, Elliott, who was staying at nearby Tomales Bay, Ann and I headed 3 miles north of town to Garden Valley Ranch to do some rose sniffing.

The vast ranch boasts thousands of bushes and counts domestic goddess Martha Stewart among its customers, said manager Dan Deevy. It is pleasantly landscaped, with lily pond, footbridge, trellises and an exquisite little “fragrance garden”--a great place to flee the noontime heat, for $4 a head.

Then we returned downtown, hitting the Petaluma Market and the modest Saturday farmers market in Walnut Park (2 to 5 p.m., summer only) for picnic supplies: sourdough, Sonoma jack cheese, salami, dried plums, organic carrots and peaches, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh cherries. Our plan: Head north on U.S. 101 to California 12 and its wineries, and loop back south through Sonoma.

Our favorite of three wineries we visited was Kunde: good, reasonably priced wines, according to oenophile Ann, plus a picnic area with fountain. Ann bought a 1997 Viognier ($20); I got the 1997 Gewurztraminer ($10.50). Nondrinker Elliott, our designated driver, was enchanted by the 1998 Varietal Grape Juice (“best I’ve ever had”) but not by the price: $6.50 a bottle. Dinner was tasty take-out pizza from Tomales Pizza in Tomales.

Come Sunday, it was impossible to keep Ann and fellow birder Elliott out of Point Reyes National Seashore, fortunately only about a half-hour away. (One of Petaluma’s charms is that it’s about equidistant from Sonoma and the sea.) Although Ann rated birding at our inn as fairly good (including violet-green swallows and Allen’s hummingbirds), she racked up rarer sightings, such as black-shouldered kites and the lesser scaup, at Point Reyes’ Olema Marsh. There we feasted on four local cheeses bought en route at Tomales Bay Foods, a 2-year-old gourmet market in Point Reyes Station.

We could have lingered for hours, but Ann and I had to catch a plane.

* More Weekend Escapes: To purchase copies of past Weekend Escapes articles, call Times on Demand at (800) 788-8804, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mon.-Fri.

Jane Engle is a Times Travel section assistant editor.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Budget for Two

Air fare: $278.00

Car rental: $85.21

Chileno Valley Ranch, 2 nights: $240.00

Dinner, Volpi’s: $66.70

Food, 2 picnics: $49.10

Pizza, Tomales Pizza: $13.60

FINAL TAB: $732.61

Chileno Valley Ranch Bed & Breakfast, 5105 Chileno Valley Road, Petaluma, CA 94952; tel. (707) 765-6664.