SoCal Notes

Corona, between everywhere

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Corona is, by most measures, not a destination. It is the kind of city that announces itself first as a freeway interchange — the meeting of the 91 and the 15, the gateway between the LA basin and the desert beyond — and only second as a place where 175,000 people quietly live. Travel guides skip it. Most people who pass through never get off the freeway.

A short visit is still worth the detour, particularly as a half-day breakup of the long drive between Los Angeles and Palm Springs.

What’s actually here

Corona started as a citrus town. The street layout downtown still echoes the original racetrack — Grand Boulevard runs in a perfect circle around the old town center, a layout almost unique in American cities and a pleasant thing to walk on a cool morning. The depots and packing houses that processed the orange groves are mostly gone, but a few have been turned into reasonable restaurants and one decent local museum.

The city’s modern identity is less photogenic and more interesting: warehousing, distribution, light manufacturing. A meaningful share of goods sold in Southern California pass through here on the way from the ports of Long Beach and LA. It is, in a small way, a useful place to think about how the rest of the region eats.

A reasonable half-day

If you have three or four hours between LA and Palm Springs:

Walk Grand Boulevard. Park near City Hall and walk the loop. It is about three miles around — closer to a brisk hour than a stroll. Architecturally a mix; the bones are early 20th century and worth looking at.
Lunch downtown. A handful of options on Main Street between Grand and Sixth. The Mexican places are the obvious choice and the right one; the citrus heritage means the salsa bars tend to be slightly better than average.
The Heritage Park. A small city park with a few preserved citrus-era buildings — a packing house, a depot, some farm equipment. Free, never crowded.
Skyline Drive. A short, paved climb into the hills above town with a view across the inland valley toward Mount Baldy on a clear day. Better at sunset than midday.

If you have a full day, you can extend with a hike at the Cleveland National Forest entrance south of town — Tin Mine Canyon is the usual recommendation — or a visit to one of the Temescal Valley wineries.

Eating and drinking

Corona is not a restaurant city, and the parts of it that are most restaurant-like are the chain-heavy strip developments around the freeway exits. The exceptions worth knowing:

A handful of carnitas places in the older parts of town. The good ones are usually inside or attached to a Mexican grocery store. They open early, close by 7, and don’t take cards in cash-only mode roughly one Tuesday a month.
Bakeries. Both Mexican (panaderías) and a couple of Vietnamese bakeries near the eastern edge of town. Cheaper than equivalents in LA, frequently as good.
Coffee. Improving but not yet good. One independent coffee shop downtown is reasonable; the rest are chains.
Beer. A short list of small breweries in industrial buildings near the freeway, the kind of taprooms that close at 9 p.m. and don’t serve food. They’re fine.

Avoid the steakhouse chains visible from the 91. They are exactly what they look like from the freeway.

When to come

Corona’s weather tracks the inland Empire generally — hotter than the coast, cooler than the desert, drier than both. Practically:

Late October through April. Comfortable. Some genuinely beautiful winter days when the smog clears after a rain.
May, June, September. Warm but manageable, mostly clear skies.
July and August. Hot, sometimes smoky from regional fires, often hazy. The shade is thin. Postpone.

Mornings, year-round, are the most pleasant time to walk anywhere in town.

Why bother

Corona is not going to be the highlight of any trip, and shouldn’t be sold as one. But the alternative — the unbroken three-hour drive between LA and the desert, with no scheduled stop — has a way of compressing both ends of the trip into a tired blur. A half-day off the freeway, a walk around an unusual street grid, a slow lunch, and a coffee for the road tend to make both the drive and the destination noticeably better.

It is, in that sense, the most honest kind of stop: not a destination, just a useful place.

Palm Springs in three modes

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Palm Springs has three audiences and pretends not to notice. There is the weekend crowd that arrives Friday night with reservations at a steakhouse and leaves Sunday afternoon with a sunburn. There is the longer-stay visitor who rents a house with a pool and never really leaves it. And there is the small population of people who actually live here, who you mostly do not see, because they are smart enough to be inside between June and September.

A good first trip means picking which one of those three you want to be and planning accordingly.

When to go

This matters more in Palm Springs than almost anywhere else.

November through March. The high season. Hotels are full, restaurants take reservations weeks out, and the weather is genuinely perfect — 70s during the day, cool at night, almost no chance of rain. Expect to pay for it.
April through May. Warmer, less crowded, still pleasant. Probably the best value-for-experience window. Bring shade.
June through September. It is too hot. Locals will tell you 110°F “isn’t that bad because it’s dry,” which is true at 7 a.m. and a lie by noon. Hotel rates collapse, which is the only reason to consider it. If you do come in summer, plan around the pool: out by 9, back by 4, never in between.
October. Transitional. Some weeks are October; some weeks are still summer. Watch the forecast.

Where to stay

The split is roughly:

Mid-century resort hotel. The Parker, the Saguaro, the Ace, and fifteen others in their orbit. You’re paying for the pool deck and the aesthetic, both of which are real but neither of which will surprise you.
House rental with a private pool. Best for groups of four or more, and for anyone who’d rather cook than make reservations. The pool will be smaller than the photos suggest. Most are inland from downtown by a few minutes; the views from the pool deck are usually the mountains, not the city.
The cheaper motels along Palm Canyon. Honest, fine, and a useful fallback during high season when nothing else is available. You will hear the highway.

Skip anything in Cathedral City unless you specifically want it; it’s not within walking distance of anything pleasant.

What to actually do

The honest answer is “nothing, on purpose.” The pleasures of Palm Springs are non-events: a long breakfast, a longer swim, a drive into the mountains for dinner, an early bed. A few specifics that justify a trip:

The aerial tramway up to Mount San Jacinto. A genuinely good idea on a hot day — 30°F cooler at the top, a few hours of pine-forest hiking, and you are back in the desert by sunset. Buy tickets online; the line in person is often longer than the ride.
Joshua Tree National Park. An hour northeast. Best at sunrise or sunset; punishing in the middle of the day. Bring more water than you think you need, and gas up before you go in — there are no services inside the park.
The Living Desert (technically in Palm Desert). A small zoo and botanical garden focused on desert ecology. Better than it sounds, good for a slow morning.
VillageFest on Thursday evenings on Palm Canyon. A street market. Mostly tourist-grade, but pleasant in November.
Date shakes at one of the date farms in Indio. A specific, regional thing worth doing once.

Skip the celebrity home tours.

Eating

Restaurants in Palm Springs cluster into three tiers and there is not much in between:

The hotel restaurants. Fine, expensive, atmospherically excellent at sunset.
The midcentury-themed restaurants downtown. Fine, less expensive, atmospherically a little tired by the third night.
The strip-mall restaurants in Cathedral City and Palm Desert. Where the locals eat. Mexican, Thai, sushi. Better than tier 2 and a quarter of the price.

A reasonable strategy: tier 1 for one nice dinner, tier 3 for the others, breakfast at whichever bakery is closest.

Practical notes

The wind. Palm Springs sits at the mouth of a wind tunnel. Late afternoons and evenings can be genuinely strong — strong enough to make outdoor dining unpleasant. The wind almost always dies overnight.
The coyotes. Real and not shy. Don’t leave small dogs unattended in yard or pool area at dusk.
The drive in. Coming from LA, leave before 3 p.m. on a Friday or after 7 p.m., and never on a holiday weekend. The 10 freeway through Banning becomes a two-hour parking lot.

Two nights is the minimum for the trip to feel worth the drive. Three nights is the right answer for most people. A full week makes sense only if you have a pool you trust.

Los Angeles, slowly

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Los Angeles rewards patience the way few American cities do. The famous landmarks — the Hollywood sign, the Walk of Fame, the pier at Santa Monica — are mostly fine, occasionally great, and almost never the reason a visit ends up being memorable. The city’s real character lives in its neighborhoods, which means a good first trip should pick two or three of them and resist the urge to see everything.

Where to base yourself

Most visitors land at LAX and book a hotel near it. This is a mistake. The airport corridor has nothing to recommend it after sunset, and the $50 cab to anywhere worth visiting adds up quickly across a four-day trip.

Three areas worth considering instead:

Koreatown. Central, dense, walkable in a way most of LA isn’t. Good food at every price point, a Metro stop, and a 20-minute drive to either downtown or the west side outside rush hour.
Highland Park. On the eastside, lower-key, full of small bookstores and coffee shops. The Gold Line connects you to downtown without driving.
Culver City. Quietly the most pleasant part of the west side. Walkable downtown, decent transit, near the beach without the beach prices.

Avoid Hollywood itself unless you have specific business there. The hotels are overpriced and the streets, after dark, are not pleasant.

Eating

The cliché about LA food — that there is no scene, only neighborhoods — is roughly true and the best reason to visit. A reasonable spread for a long weekend:

A breakfast burrito from a hole-in-the-wall in Boyle Heights or East LA. Look for places with the salsa bar in front and the menu only in Spanish. The breakfast burrito at most coffee shops is not the same thing.
Korean barbecue in Koreatown, ideally on a weeknight to avoid the wait. The all-you-can-eat places are fine; the à la carte places are better and not much more expensive once you stop ordering things you don’t want.
A sit-down Mexican meal in the city. Mariscos for lunch on a hot day, a birria spot for dinner. Skip the chain Mexican near the beach.
Dim sum in the San Gabriel Valley. Drive east on a Saturday morning, get there by 10 a.m., expect to wait, and don’t order anything that comes out of a freezer.

If you eat one fancy meal, make it lunch. Dinner reservations in LA mean either booking three weeks out or eating at 5:30 p.m.

Getting around

Renting a car is the obvious move and the wrong one for most short trips. A car becomes a liability the moment you want to drink, and parking in Hollywood, downtown, or anywhere on the west side is its own minor career.

Strategy that works for most visitors:

Take a cab or rideshare from the airport.
Use rideshare for everything inside a 5-mile radius of where you’re staying.
Rent a car for one day if you want to drive Mulholland or get to the San Gabriel Valley.

The Metro is real and useful — the Gold Line in particular — but the network is incomplete, and most visitors don’t have the patience to plan around it.

When to go

October and early November are the best weeks of the year: warm days, cool evenings, no smoke, no rain. February through April is the second-best window. Summer is hotter than people remember and the air is worse; winter is fine but the days are short.

Avoid the week between Christmas and New Year unless you specifically want to see what LA looks like nearly empty, which is a real, if niche, experience.

A short list of unglamorous favorites

The reading room at the Central Library downtown. Free, quiet, open past 6 p.m. on weekdays.
The Huntington Gardens in San Marino. Pay the entry fee, skip the art, walk straight to the Chinese garden, find a bench.
Grand Central Market before noon. After noon it becomes a tourist pen.
The hike up to the Wisdom Tree above Burbank. Steep, short, no shade, great at sunrise.
Any neighborhood farmers market on a Sunday. Hollywood’s is the most famous; the one in Atwater Village is better.

Three days is enough for a first visit. A week is better. Two weeks is when the city starts to make sense.