There is nothing better than a happy accident – not a car accident, but a missed turn-off that reveals an eye-popping, jaw-dropping view which is what happened on my backroads drive from Petaluma, in Sonoma County to Lagunitas, in Marin County. After whizzing past The Marin Cheese Company, without enough time to pull over (next […]

Happy New Year, a bit belated, armchair travelers and road warriors alike!  A new year offers a clean slate for travel this year. I’ve made plans for Japan, Hawai’i and Europe, that hopefully won’t get delayed by illness, a lost passport, a death in the family or other unknown factors which wreaked havoc on my […]

All it took was a crumbly shard of shale cascading down a steep cliff face forcing me to look upward into the blue skies above the rugged Sespe Wilderness, part of the Los Padres National Forest. It was a majestic desert bighorn ram nimbly traversing toward me. Suddenly, I forgot how exposed I was on […]

I could see the dark rippling water off the port side of my kayak as we paddled southeast toward the northwest end of Santa Cruz Island. After paddling east, away from Carrington Point on Santa Rosa Island, and halfway across the Santa Cruz Passage, I searched for a favorable down-island current to propel myself and […]

The seabirds must’ve seen what I was seeing and were reveling in the explosion of late season winter rains and consistent fog drip on Channel Islands National Park. I was enjoying the best giant coreopsis bloom I could remember on the southeast end of Santa Cruz Island, mostly from the seat of my kayak. It […]

My posh trip to Napa wine country began elegantly as we soared out of a private terminal at Van Nuys Airport on Aero’s LA-Napa service on a semi-private plane. In just a little over an hour-long, smooth flight – Erewon fresh avocado tartine/toast, sweet berries and coffee served with cloth napkins in flight – a […]

The limestone monolith towered above Shasta Lake within the Trinity Alps National Forest. Naturally carved within its mighty limestone crags was one of the biggest cave systems in the U.S. We boarded a small boat and easily motored across to the other side of shimmering Shasta Lake. A solitary bald eagle roosted atop a gnarled […]

From my kayak, there was no touching down on any beach on Vandenberg Air Force Base. This remote stretch of rugged Central California Coastline is off limits to Joe Public, even if the only member of the common man within the region was a salt-encrusted, sunscreen-smeared paddler in search of empty surf. I was paddling […]

The sounds and movements were more than familiar to us. The knocks, snorts, sneezes and galumphing led us to the most northern and newest northern elephant seal colony in California, and the world.  The Lost Coast in Northern California’s Humboldt County, and beneath the mighty King Range, offers refuge for lots of wildlife; seabirds, raptors, […]

The last time I visited Oceanside, in northern San Diego County, was a decade ago. There was a lively restaurant, The Flying Pig Pub and Kitchen, which survived COVID (that I did not revisit this time) and a lone little Victorian cottage, the “Graves House” sitting in an empty, weedy beachfront field.  More popularly known […]