The list keeps growing. The picks stay opinionated.
4 picks from San Diego.
Twenty minutes north of downtown San Diego, La Jolla is the version of Southern California that earned the reputation. Seals on the rocks at Children's Pool, a tasting menu at Addison that costs less than it should, and a Saturday morning at the Farmers Market that reminds you why people move here.
An hour by ferry from San Diego, you step off the boat into a town with no cars, no chains, and a 1929 casino that never saw a roulette wheel. Two nights gets you past the day-tripper crowds and into the version of Catalina where you hike the interior at sunrise and eat swordfish on the waterfront at 7pm.
A mountain lake two hours from San Diego that earns the drive. Cedar cabins with woodstoves, dinner at a trout house that's been here since 1952, and the kind of cold morning air that makes you understand why people keep coffee mugs by the bed. Two nights gets you the lake loop, the bakery everyone drives up for, and the version of Big Bear that isn't jet skis in July.
Two hours east of San Diego into a desert town that got modernism right the first time. Mid-century houses that photograph themselves, a tram that takes you 8,000 feet up in twelve minutes, and hotel pools designed by people who understood that water in the desert is the whole point.
