Biking on State Street in Santa Barbara.
Labor Day has a way of narrowing the calendar. The heat holds, the light turns gold by six, and for a few more weekends, California still feels like summer. Five destinations, each within a tank of gas from Los Angeles, make the case for one last trip before the season turns.
Santa Barbara sits closest, a two hour drive up the 101 that ends somewhere between a beach town and a wine country. The “American Riviera” nickname gets thrown around loosely, but the coastline earns some of it. Vineyards line the hills outside town, tasting rooms cluster downtown within walking distance of each other, and the harbor empties out each evening for sunset sails that catch the Channel Islands in silhouette.
Stearns Wharf anchors one end of a flat, easy bike route along State Street, the kind of ride that asks nothing of a traveler beyond showing up. Kayakers work the coastline in the mornings before the wind picks up. It is the sort of place built for a spontaneous Saturday that quietly becomes a Sunday too.
Palm Springs and Joshua Tree offer the desert version of the same impulse, roughly two hours east and worth treating as a single trip rather than two. The Spa at Séc-he, a 73,000 square foot wellness complex built around the valley’s natural mineral springs, gives the town its center of gravity, though plenty of visitors are just as content by a pool with the mountains going pink at dusk. Joshua Tree sits an hour further east, its granite boulders and Dr. Seuss trees drawing hikers by day and stargazers after dark, when the absence of city light turns the sky into something Southern California rarely offers.
Carmel by the Sea, roughly six hours north along a coastline that took a beating from recent storms, has its main artery back. Highway 1 reopened, and with it a stretch of road that remains one of the more theatrical drives in the country. Carmel itself moves at the pace of a small European village that happens to sit on the Pacific, its downtown built for wandering into galleries and shops without much of a plan. Sea otters and harbor seals work the coastline within sight of the beach. Big Sur lies just thirty minutes south, close enough to fold into a day trip without disrupting much else.
San Francisco rounds out the trip north.
Mission Bay has a new anchor in LUMA, the neighborhood’s first hotel, positioned within easy reach of the ballpark and the waterfront. Baseball season gives the city an unusual vantage point this time of year: a Baseball by the Bay package sends guests out onto McCovey Cove by kayak to watch a game unfold from the water, home run splashes included, before the evening settles into drinks at Cavaña, the hotel’s rooftop lounge overlooking the bay.
Mendocino sits furthest out, three and a half hours north of San Francisco along a route that trades highway for two lane road through redwoods. The Skunk Train still runs through the forest much as it has for over a century, hauling passengers past trees old enough to make most itineraries feel irrelevant. The Mendocino Headlands stretch out in windswept bluffs and beaches, while the tide pools at MacKerricher State Park turn low tide into an unplanned nature walk, starfish and anemones exposed for an hour or two before the water reclaims them. Families tend to find their way here, drawn by a pace that asks for nothing more than time.
Five trips, five different distances, one shared logic: summer is still open for a little while longer, and California rarely makes it hard to find a reason to stay out in it.
