Tag archives: travel
Just before COVID, the British journal New Scientist offered a tour to Madagascar, and I immediately placed a deposit. More than 20 years ago, I had attended a talk on Madagascar, which piqued my interest but also only offered a bleak interpretation of its conservation. (For a fuller discussion, see my article titled, “A Lesson […]
As I walked across an icy Pixley National Wildlife Refuge (NWF), five miles west of Highway 99, it sounded as if I was inside a packed house of a football stadium. It was an hour before sunset, and it sounded as if it was that loud. Just past sunset, squadrons of migratory sandhill cranes were […]
After the deluge, I took a quick, much-needed weekend jaunt up the coast. Our Central Coast hills, highways, and byways were verdant after the rains, making it hard to believe it’s still winter. Well, California winter. Tourism was evident (but not too crazy) and staffing issues are still difficult in the hospitality trade. Los Alamos […]
Santa Barbara Travel Bureau co-owners Charles and David de L’Arbre and his family left Brussels, Belgium, in May 1940 just ahead of an advancing German army. Charles’s father packed their things, filled the family Buick’s gas tank, threw another tank of gas in the trunk, and took off. Charles recalls that his grandmother was walking […]
We hugged the crumbly west cliff face of Cuyler Harbor on San Miguel Island with no expectations from the seat of our kayaks. From afar, we couldn’t see any wildlife, but we could clearly hear first-year northern elephant seals snorting and bellowing on distant pocket beaches concealed along the rocky shoreline. I was paddling with […]
Descending San Miguel Hill at a feverish pace, I’d just left a freshly soddened Green Mountain to the west in my rearview mirror. San Miguel Island always delivering a diverse mix of unpredictable weather patterns. Green Mountain was cloaked in dewy fog and swept in 20 mph northwest winds. It felt like sideways rain as […]
Grab your cowboy hat and cowboy boots, throw your kids or grandkids (if it’s a weekend) in the car, or perhaps indulge in a midweek romantic getaway and head on up to historic Alisal Ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley for a tootin’ good time. I’ve visited the downhome 10,500-acre Alisal Ranch several times over […]
The weather window was tight. It was one day, and we took advantage of it, circumnavigating the 27 coastal miles of San Miguel Island, the most northwesterly isle in the Channel Islands National Park. After several solo circumnavigations of this wave-battered, teeming islet, I was gratefully joined by four kayak guides who I work with […]
It’s just one of so many countless hidden nooks and crannies carved out over time by volcanic upheaval, the surf, and weather along the craggy coastlines of the Channel Islands National Park. Most of these concealed, volcanic alcoves, corridors, and toothy grottos are only accessible by kayak. Going on foot or even by boat won’t […]
My fall trip to Northern California wine country was designed to spend a few nights during the tail end of harvest season in Sonoma. This included checking out the recently opened Montage Healdsburg resort, a stunning and tranquil retreat set on 258 acres of heritage oak forest, also dotted with manzanita and madrone trees. Vineyards […]
I rarely travel in the summer: too many tourists and, as the summer of 2022 proved, oodles of delayed flights, piles of lost luggage, and cases of COVID contracted. Plenty of friends can vouch for these annoyances, including Rachel Kaganoff Stern and her sister Tessa Kaganoff, who were separated from their luggage in London for […]
I’d seen them on Old Army Pass in the Eastern Sierra a few years ago, small in stature but hardy American pikas, keystone species and great indicators of a warming planet. Before I saw them, it was their grating chirps concealed in talus, gritty granite habitat required for their survival. The hike to the […]
They could’ve been tiny patches of snow on a distant mountain face, winter clinging to an Arctic summer on the North Slope of the Brooks Range in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). However, scanning with my binoculars while on a braided, swift-moving raft, on the Kongakut River, 18 snowy white Dall sheep gradually grazed […]
The prominent sandstone rock outcropping was riddled with gritty alcoves, clefts, lofty ledges, and shadowy caves. As I scanned with binoculars for any feathered occupants, I found five barn owls nesting in the upper reaches of this remote, sandstone cathedral. However, there was something else that caught my attention while attempting to conceal themselves 20 […]
Standing at the overlook of idyllic China Cove, located within the Point Lobos State Natural Reserve between the Big Sur Coast and Carmel, I could see why the 70-something-year-old gentleman had erected his easel where he did. It was midday and as the sun beamed down from overhead, it illuminated the tranquility of China Cove. […]
My weekend trip to San Francisco began with a bang. I was bopping along in the fast lane of the 101, when just north of Gilroy and south of Morgan Hill, I heard a loud “clank” at the front left of my car. A few light, rain-filled moments later, I realized I had blown a […]
While the world was going to hell in a handbasket, I escaped to Rancho Santa Fe, a sort of Montecito for the horsey set, for a couple of glorious nights at lovely Rancho Valencia Resort & Spa, a Spanish-Colonial hacienda style resort set on 45 acres in north San Diego County that’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive […]
That bowl of oats is almost a daily ritual at this stage of life. Organic oats, organic granola, organic honey, and berries; blue, black and raspberries, plus a ripe banana along with some creamy hemp milk will suffice, rain, shine, fog or northwest winds. When the island foxes are around, they tilt their heads upwards […]
It’s an eight-hour trek by car from our parts to Nevada City, but if you love history, historic hotels with a hip edge, and mountain scenery, it’s worth the miles. Located approximately 60 miles northeast of Sacramento, Nevada City was once a booming mining town – and they play off their past. A recently restored […]
In 1979, I was a young teen and very green in the ways of animal behavior. I was surfing out front of my home in Carpinteria. It was wintertime and the beach was deserted under cloudy skies. I was the only one surfing that cold, crisp overcast morning. It wasn’t long before I heard a […]
