Weekend escapes: Quick getaways close to Southern California
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This year Amador County celebrates the 150th year since the planting of the Original Grandpere Zinfandel vineyard in the Sierra foothills southeast of Sacramento.
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My family’s getaway late last year to Oregon’s stormy coast was invigorating.
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A century before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, America was abuzz with news of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, an equally momentous feat for that era.
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Can something feel very hot and very cold at the same time?
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Vancouver, Canada, teems with tourists in the summer, including many who come here to board Alaskan cruises.
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Beyond the strip malls and waterfront mansions lies an Orange County that seems concerned about neither of those things.
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The saguaro, with towering trunks and branches studded with spines, is synonymous with the American Southwest.
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A week on a tropical island wasn’t in the cards for my family last spring, so we did the next best thing: drove 20 minutes from our Mill Valley home to the town of Tiburon for an overnight bayside fix.
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Camping has never been my thing.
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“Are you going to Indian Wells?”
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In some ghost towns, you have to rev up your imagination to picture what life was like in the old days.
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These days Seattle is a high-tech boomtown, but I grew up in the Emerald City long before Amazon, Starbucks and Microsoft made it so.
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The city of Alameda, in the San Francisco Bay Area, is adjacent to Oakland — but it’s a world apart.
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Death Valley is less than a five-hour drive from Los Angeles, but it is as desolate as a planet in a galaxy far, far away.
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Below are our editors’ 10 favorite Weekend Escapes from 2018, an intentionally subjective selection intended to capture the range of travel options at our doorsteps.
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I felt as though I were climbing into a mummy’s sarcophagus as I settled into the empty concrete tub, but I figured that if Mark Twain could do it, so could I: take the waters at Vichy Springs near Ukiah, Calif.
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I came to Colorado Springs in search of echoes of Katharine Lee Bates, who, 125 years ago, wrote a poem there that became “America the Beautiful.”
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Coronado, with its beautiful beaches and delightful village center, is a fine spot to spend a weekend almost any time of the year, but my husband and I chose fall when the air is a bit crisper and the crowds a bit sparser.
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Once famed for its citrus groves, Riverside today is best known for its Festival of Lights.
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You’ll wind up in Mexico if you miss the turnoff on Arizona 286 to Rancho de la Osa.
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I have visited Sausalito many times but somehow never spent any time in neighboring Mill Valley, nestled in Marin County at the foot of Mt.
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I’ve kicked around quaint, dusty Santa Margarita off and on for years.
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Since the 1950s the Skyview Motel in Los Alamos has been a quick overnight stop for travelers making the L.A.
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La Jolla Village, sometimes called the Beverly Hills of San Diego, is the ideal setting for a big-splurge fall weekend.
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“Do I pack golf shoes or snow gear?” my wife, Terri, asked. “Yes,” I replied.
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Our grandsons, ages 4 and 7, live and breathe Legos, so they rejoiced when I booked a hotel and admissions package at Legoland in Carlsbad, Calif.
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My husband, Paul, and I discovered marvelous Markleeville thanks to a mudslide in May, which prompted a detour that opened our eyes to a spectacular slice of California.
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Looking for a weekend escape before summer escapes?
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San Pedro, with its steep hills and panoramic ocean views, reminds me of San Francisco, one of my favorite cities.
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My husband, Paul, likes to fish; I like trees.
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By design or default, Cayucos has remained an unfussy little beach community sitting quietly off Highway 1 on California’s scenic Central Coast.
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When I asked my Las Vegas friend Marian how she survived her city’s beastly summer heat, she had two words for me: Mt.
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Gray skies kept me out of the surf on a recent visit to Laguna Beach, but I found plenty to enjoy on dry land.
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As a dedicated Dodger fan and lover of baseball, I’m good for about 200 games a year, in person or on TV.
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San Diego’s Pacific Beach has a split personality.
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Livermore will keep the light on for you.
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As my 14-year-old son, Anders, scampered up a metal ladder to the gun emplacements at Ft.
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“This is just like Tatooine!”
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If you have never heard of Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, that’s understandable.
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When my wife, Jeannie, was a girl, she and her father spent every summer in Mammoth Lakes.
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Healdsburg is nearly everyone’s idea of a trendy Sonoma County destination.
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I had a hankering to drive by the Whispering Winds Ranch in Creston, Calif., where I had lived for a year in the early 1980s.
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It seemed like a tall order: My wife and I had a four-day window we wanted to fill with history, hiking, good eats, an interesting hotel and pleasant weather.
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Ever wondered what it’s like to sleep in a fire lookout tower?
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Sonora is a launching point for the great outdoors: Yosemite National Park and the Sierra are nearby.
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The last time I visited the Grand Canyon, I was a teenager … eons ago.
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Carpinteria loves to call itself the “home of the world’s safest beach” and although that may be true, my wife and I discovered that Carpinteria, on a blustery spring day, had much more to offer than choppy surf and blowing sand.
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It was August, and we were visiting relatives in Phoenix. And it was hot. Really hot.
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Weekends are precious — hey, there are generally only 52 of them each year.
