Hotel La Rose

From where I sit sipping my coffee next to the train tracks, I can see the Hotel La Rose and the train station, separated by a little park with a bronze statue of Charlie Brown and Snoopy from the Peanuts cartoon. The creator of Peanuts, Charles Schulz, was a long time resident of Santa Rosa until his death in 2000. He built an ice rink, Snoopy's Home Ice, which is still well used by little kids, hockey teams and recreational skaters alike. My grandson Will had his first skating experience there when he was about three or four and was given a little wooden chair to push around the ice. The town is filled with statues of Peanuts characters, but I chose the bronze one in Railroad Square for today's extra.

The Hotel La Rose was built in 1907 by the same Italian stonemasons who built the train station, the Western Hotel, which now houses Flying Goat Coffee, the railway express office, now home to Aroma Roasters Coffee House. The basalt for these buildings, and many others scattered around the county, was quarried locally from the hills to the east of town.

It is a historic and diverse part of town which continues to interest me and provide a colorful backdrop for my almost daily coffee break. It will be interesting to see what happens when a passenger train is running once again on the tracks later this year.