This is the third and final installment of travel writer Tarmo Hannula’s account of his trip to Petaluma. Click here for part 1 and here for part 2.
As we steered south from Cotati and rolled back through Petaluma, my wife, Sarah, and I still had a few spots on the map to check off and round out our one-night drive to the top of the North Bay.
With our 2025 Hyundai Elantra averaging 59 miles per gallon, the road trip proved favorable to the wallet. We drove south to the Mission San Rafael Arcángel in San Rafael.
While parking, we noticed the small downtown was packed with cafes, each crowded with people crouched over their laptops and cell phones. We also drove past a curiosity—the Museum of International Propaganda—before parking at the mission.
Mission San Rafael Arcángel was founded in 1817 and is the second to last in the string of 21 California missions. It is named after Saint Raphael the Arcángel—the angel of bodily healing—and is perched on a steep hillside with a large brick courtyard.
After wandering the grounds and viewing handmade baskets by indigenous people of the region, we found our way back to Highway 1 and to the Marin County Civic Center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was built in 1960 after Wright’s death, and was the largest of his public projects and his last commission.
Then we headed over the dramatic steel jungle gym of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. The heavily travelled toll bridge spans a narrow passage of the San Francisco Bay, connecting Contra Costa and Marin counties.
Having completed a large loop, from the Golden Gate Bridge, up the rugged coast and inland to Petaluma and south again toward the Bay Area, we had stacked up a hefty list of places that we felt warranted a return trip. Bolinas and Stinson Beach offered small-town charm with a rustic edge. The country drive through Point Reyes National Seashore and east on the Point Reyes/Petaluma Road gave us a healthy sampling of the farm life and unspoiled rolling hills that led us into Petaluma.
Old Town Petaluma gave us plenty of curious historical sites and eateries to choose from and scads of busy, colorful streets to meander through. The Usher Gallery, with its exhibit by the late Barbara Kelly, “Reflections and Time,” was a high point that we stumbled upon.
After we worked our way past Berkeley, where my parents attended college in the early 1950s and Sarah’s family lived for a short stint, we joined the flow of traffic along the East Bay to San Jose. There we relished our last meal of the trip at the Falafels Drive-In, a place that’s been around since 1966 and almost always has a line of customers, a testimony to their amazing Middle Eastern food.
The author confuses Highway 1 that runs along the coast with Highway 101 that runs further inland and connects the Marin Civic Center and Petaluma. Beautiful area.