The list keeps growing. The picks stay opinionated.
5 picks from San Francisco.
Ten days split between El Calafate for the glaciers and El Chaltén for the hiking that earns the scenery. Perito Moreno up close, Laguna de los Tres at sunrise, a week of asado that costs what steak should. This is the trip where you stop checking your phone because there's no service and you stop caring because the mountains look like that.
Two hours down the coast to a one-square-mile village where the sidewalks are optional and the cypress trees do more work than the marketing. Stay at La Playa Carmel — the 1904 estate where Doris Day used to live upstairs — and spend a weekend walking to everything that matters.
Two hours from the Bay Area, a lake so blue it looks fake and a single hotel that figured out how to be serious without being a ski resort. Sunnyside sits directly on the water in Tahoe City — lake-view rooms, a deck that gets afternoon sun even in January, and a dining room where locals eat dinner.
Two nights in Yountville — the town that built itself around The French Laundry and kept going. Walk to dinner at three restaurants that take reservations, bike through vineyards that don't charge tasting fees, sleep at a hotel that understands you're not here for a bachelorette party.
Three hours north of San Francisco, Mendocino sits on bluffs above the Pacific with no beach access and no apologies. The town is eight blocks of carpenter gothic and redwood water towers. Go in October when the fog's back and the crowds aren't.
