More on California
By Mary Forgione
Santa Barbara wants visitors to enroll in Culture 101. It's a...
By Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
About 20 miles beyond the red-tile roofs of downtown Santa Barbara, it begins: the rolling blond hills that go indecently green in spring,...
By Alison DaRosa
This 16-room Arts and Crafts masterpiece on the edge of San Diego's Balboa Park was the home of George and Anna Marston and their five...
By Irene Lechowitzky
Benicia, a small waterfront town in the Bay Area often overlooked by travelers, is an elixir for big-city angst. Less than an hour from...
By Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
Maybe you've always suspected that there was more to San Diego's North County than beach towns, rolling hills, expat giraffes and a walled...
By Jordan Rane, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Ferrying to Santa Catalina Island — just you, that special someone and an upper deck brimming with buoyant kids, chiding parents and...
By Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
If all of California had been created by a romance novelist, it would probably look like Santa Barbara -- whitewashed walls, red-tile roofs,...
By Ryan Ritchie, Special to the Los Angeles Times
The 51st state. The closer you get to the Oregon border along the 5 Freeway, you begin to see signs announcing the State of Jefferson. After...
Candlestick Point Park Pier
By Christopher Smith
How was that little vacation you took? You remember. It cost you almost nothing, it burned some calories (or, after that ice cream cone,...
By Susan Spano, Special to the Los Angeles Times
CARRIZO PLAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. — In his obsession to see every back road in Southern California, my brother, John, recently...
By Ryan Ritchie
About 55,000 people call Hanford, Calif., home, but the town is filled with enough history to accommodate a city of millions. Downtown is...
By Chris Erskine, Los Angeles Times staff writer
Mindful that great American road trips occur in all sorts of vessels — heck, Huck rode a rickety raft — we're on a Greyhound bus...
By Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
San Diego could be improved. If the county had 75 miles of beaches instead of 70. If the Padres won a World Series or the Chargers won a...
By Ryan Ritchie, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Intro: Let wine snobs snicker when they hear you spent a weekend at a vineyard in Temecula. I took a friend for an...
By Jessica Gelt, Los Angeles Times
The sleepy Central Coast town of Arroyo Grande, population 17,000, is the ideal place to shut out the mayhem of city life for a few days....
By Jay Jones, Special to the Los Angeles Times
As its 75th birthday fast approaches, the Golden Gate Bridge is getting a little birthday present. Even though about 40 million vehicles...
By Angela Frucci, Special to the Los Angeles Times
The fantastical murals of San Francisco's Mission District are an intriguing dialogue between artists and their city that you can easily...
By Catharine Hamm, Los Angeles Times
If you know anything at all about Del Mar, it's that the seaside town north of San Diego is the place to play the ponies. The horses aren'...