Petaluma's Victorian Downtown & the Bohemian Highway

Petaluma's Copeland Street and Kentucky Street preserve a compact Victorian commercial district with 100+ buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places — Italianate facades, cast-iron storefronts, and a working riverfront where paddlewheel steamers operated until 1950. The Golden Eagle building (1886), the McNear Building (1886), and the Palace Hotel (1902) anchor the historic core; the Petaluma Adobe State Historic Park 2 miles east preserves General Mariano Vallejo's 1836 rancho headquarters, the largest adobe structure in California north of the missions.

A Petaluma restaurant focusing on Sonoma County produce with a wood-fired oven and house-made pasta in a 1906 commercial building on Western Avenue. The menu changes with the season; the sourcing is exclusively from named local farms. One of the better farm-to-table restaurants in the North Bay outside of the established Yountville and Healdsburg corridors.

A wood-fired artisan bakery in the hamlet of Freestone operating since 1999, open Fridays through Mondays — the wait for bread at the outdoor picnic tables outside the old-wood barn can exceed 45 minutes, and it is worth it. The focaccia, olive bread, and fruit-studded whole-grain loaves are baked in a 5-ton wood-fired oven; the sticky buns with black pepper and fennel are available until they sell out, usually by 11 AM.

A redwood-and-Victorian village of 1,200 people in the Russian River watershed, settled in the 1870s by Italian immigrants who named it for the western exposure of the surrounding hills. The main street has three excellent Italian restaurants (family-style service, communal tables, bottomless pasta bowls) that have operated continuously since the 1930s; the surrounding redwood groves and the Bohemian Highway corridor through Freestone and Camp Meeker feel geographically and culturally remote from suburban Marin despite the 60-minute drive.

A family-style Italian restaurant operating in Occidental since 1946 — the pasta is house-made, the service is communal (shared platters of minestrone, salad, pasta, and roast chicken), and the dining room is exactly as it appeared in 1946. The fifth generation of the family operates the kitchen; the recipe for the tomato sauce has not changed. A West Sonoma County institution.