SoCal Notes is a small personal field guide to a handful of Southern California cities. It started as a folder of half-written travel notes — directions to a diner that doesn’t show up on the first page of search results, the name of a trail my friend swears by, the cheapest hour at a hotel pool — and grew until it seemed easier to put it on the open web than to keep emailing it around.

The scope is intentionally narrow: three cities, a handful of pages each, no attempt to be comprehensive. The entries lean toward what’s still good in person rather than what photographs well, which means a lot of corner restaurants and some unfashionable opinions about freeways.

Pages are written and updated by hand on no particular schedule. There is no newsletter, no comments section, and no business behind the site. If something on a page is wrong or out of date — a place has closed, a price has changed, the bus no longer runs that way — assume the entry is older than the information you have.

Conventions

• Times are local (Pacific). Hours of operation drift; call ahead for anything weather-dependent.
• Prices are rounded; expect them to be 10–20% higher in practice once parking, tax, and tip are added.
• Driving times assume light traffic, which in Los Angeles means roughly 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday. Add a generous buffer for anything else.

Colophon

The site is a static build — no JavaScript framework, no tracking, no third-party embeds. Pages are plain HTML and CSS, served over TLS. Photos are licensed freely; text is by the author.