Northern California Road Trip: Golden Gate Bridge and Mrs Grossman's Sticker Factory
I paid my own way at Mrs Grossman's Sticker Factory. Whenever I accept a free product or service for review, I will always let you know. While I'm disclosing things, I should also let you know that if you purchase a product through an Amazon link on my site, I will receive a small commission.
I owe a huge thank you to Meg of Backpack To Buggy who sent me a very detailed list of suggestions about things to do and see while we were in Sonoma County.
The drive from San Francisco to Napa is about one and a half hours. That's not long at all, unless you happen to have a 7 month old who hates being in the car with you. Like we did. Too keep things calm, we planned lots of interesting stops and armed the "big kids" with their favorite road trip toy, the Aquadoodle Travel Doodle
Whenever we cross the Golden Gate Bridge we stop at the viewpoint on the Northern end of the bridge, in the Marin Headlands. It's touristy, sure, but on a clear day the view is unbeatable. This is a lovely area to hike if you have the time and inclination, but today we were off on our way pretty quickly.
I'm a sucker for factory tours, and I thought that a tour of Mrs Grossman's Sticker Factory would be fun for all of us. It turns out my kids have a fierce aversion to factory tours. I'm not sure why, but they refused to join the tour, and I practically had to drag them in to the Sticker Factory Shop. Sometimes I want to say to them "It shouldn't be this hard for me to get you to do something FUN!" I mean, really, stickers and preschoolers go hand in hand, at least in my house.
But perhaps this outing was more about me than I'd be likely to admit. I remember buying Mrs. Grossman's stickers as a kid and preserving them carefully in a treasured photo album. My friends and I would trade "rare" stickers with one another and compare collections regularly. Mrs Grossman's stickers were the gold standard. At that time, everything else looked schlocky by comparison. Looking back, I'm not sure what all the fuss was about, but I really enjoyed looking at the displays showing all the stickers the Mrs Grossman's made in those early years - they brought back memories of my Junior High friendships, the places we used to go for sticker shopping, and most of all, my big photo album full of stickers!
Once I finally got the kids inside the company's sticker store (and yes, I did almost find myself offering insane bribes to get them there), they were floored. They've never seen so many stickers together in one place. Every design needed to be inspected and evaluated. I told the kids that they could each choose two sheets of stickers (and then surreptitiously selected some interesting looking sets to be saved for restaurant emergencies.) At the cash register we noticed "mystery packs" which included $10 worth of stickers in a box for $2, and these turned out to be a huge hit when they were opened.
With the kids finally feeling comfortable, we wandered around peeking through windows and looking at the sticker warehouse and production floor. Not as good as a real tour, of course, but still interesting.
And then we all piled back into the car to make our way to "downtown" Napa, where we had a reservation at the brand new Avia Napa Hotel. Check back tomorrow for my review of the hotel and more about what we did in Napa with the kids.
Related LinksSan Francisco With Kids City Guide
Sonoma and Petaluma with Kids
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Posted on February 8, 2010 |
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amida on February 8, 2010 at 11 a.m.
I've always wanted to visit this factory, if only to get some samples. I too was a sticker fanatic when I was little. I might have passed the condition on to my daughter as well so mrs grossman's would be a great field trip!