12 Southern California Towns With A Slower Pace Of Life
Southern California runs on theme parks, freeways, and crowded beaches. It also holds a dozen towns where none of that applies. Cambria counts its sea otters and Solvang counts its windmills. Borrego Springs counts the stars, because an ordinance keeps the streetlights low. These twelve towns run on a quieter clock and are the corners of California that never learned to hurry.
Cambria
Cambria has about 6,000 people and a coastline where the otters tend to outnumber the surfers. Moonstone Beach is the center of it, a stretch of bluff with a one-mile boardwalk and seals working the rocks below. Two miles north, Hearst San Simeon State Park covers more than 3,400 acres of shoreline, wetland, and a rare stand of Monterey pine, with a campground and beaches that rarely fill up. The stranger draw sits about 13 miles out at the Elephant Seal Vista Point, where northern elephant seals haul out, spar, and molt within easy view for much of the year. The best months to watch are December through April, when the pups arrive. For dinner, Robin's Restaurant serves its food in a garden and has done so long enough to be the local default.
Oak View
Oak View sits on Highway 33 about ten miles inland from the coast, and it claims the only rural winery in Ventura County. That is Oak Creek Ranch Winery, set on an 850-acre ranch with an outdoor tasting area that looks out on the vineyards and hills. The bigger attraction is just outside town at the Lake Casitas Recreation Area, where the lake handles boating, kayaking, and fishing and the campground runs to more than 400 sites. Hikers head for the Sulphur Mountain Road Trail, a ten-mile one-way climb with long views and a fair chance of crossing paths with deer, hawks, or a rattlesnake. None of it asks much of a visitor beyond showing up.
Ojai
Ojai sits in a valley under the Topatopa Mountains that runs east to west instead of north to south, which is why the cliffs above town turn rose-colored at sunset most evenings. Locals call it the Pink Moment and plan around it. The town built its reputation on wellness, anchored by the Ojai Valley Inn with its spa, golf course, and gardens. The Ojai Valley Trail leaves downtown and runs more than nine miles to the coast at Ventura, open to walkers, runners, and bikes. The local landmark, though, is Bart's Books, an outdoor bookstore open since 1964 with more than 130,000 titles on shelves that face the street. After hours, you pay through a slot in the door.
Solvang
Solvang is a Danish town in the Santa Ynez Valley, founded in 1911 by Danish-American educators who wanted a folk school out west. They committed to the theme. Four working windmills turn over half-timbered rooftops, Olsen's Danish Village Bakery has sold aebleskiver and kringle since 1970, and Danish royalty has visited more than once. The Elverhoj Museum of History and Art, in a home styled after an eighteenth-century Danish farmhouse, lays out the town's Danish-American story in artifacts and rotating exhibits. A block east sits Mission Santa Inés, founded in 1804 as the nineteenth of California's twenty-one missions, and on the north side Hans Christian Andersen Park has the trails and the playground.
Avila Beach
Avila Beach sits in San Luis Obispo Bay, where the surrounding hills block the wind and keep the water calmer than most of the central coast. Avila Main Beach is the easy option, good for a day of soft sand, paddleboarding, and swimming. Pirate's Cove, reached by a short steep trail to a set of sea caves and cliffs, is the other option, and it is clothing-optional. The Bob Jones Trail runs 2.5 miles from downtown along a creek, passing the Avila Valley Barn, where the draw is fresh produce, homemade pie, and a yard full of farm animals. About two miles west, Avila Hot Springs adds mineral pools and massages to the list.
Pismo Beach
Pismo Beach is busier than most towns on this list, but Pismo State Beach runs for several miles along the coast, so there is room. It is also one of the last beaches in California you can legally drive onto. In winter the town gets quieter company, when one of the largest colonies of monarch butterflies in the state settles into the eucalyptus at the Monarch Butterfly Grove before continuing its migration. Dinosaur Caves Park, eleven acres on the bluffs, has walking trails and overlooks where seabirds and sea lions show up. Splash Café, a short walk from the water, has built its name on clam chowder served in a sourdough bowl.
Carpinteria
Carpinteria has fewer than 14,000 residents and a beach that locals call the world's safest, a claim that rests on the gentle surf created by the offshore Channel Islands. Carpinteria State Beach stretches about a mile of rock and sand and comes with campsites right behind it. The town's name comes from the natural tar that seeps up through the sand here, which the Chumash once used to seal their canoes. West of the beach, the Carpinteria Bluffs Nature Preserve runs nearly two miles of blufftop trail above the water. For something further off-script, Canzelle Alpacas lets visitors spend an afternoon with more than 40 alpacas, llamas, horses, and sheep.
Lake Isabella
Lake Isabella has fewer than 4,000 residents and one of California's larger reservoirs sitting next to it, which is where the town got its name. The lake handles jet skiing, windsurfing, fishing, and sailing, with marinas like Lake Gulch Marina renting boats and running more than 100 slips. The Kern River runs through the area and turns into serious whitewater, with guided trips through outfitters such as Kern River Tours. The local history is stranger than the water sports. Two miles from downtown, the Silver City Ghost Town is an open-air museum of buildings hauled in from abandoned Kern Valley mining settlements, including ones left behind when the reservoir was filled.
Julian
Julian started as a gold-rush town after a strike in the 1870s, and the Eagle and High Peak Mine still runs underground tours past the original machinery. The town traded gold for apples a long time ago, and the pie shops now draw the lines that the mines once did. At the center of downtown is the Julian Gold Rush Hotel, which has operated continuously since 1897 and is the oldest hotel in Southern California, fitted with antique rooms and modern plumbing. Five miles out, William Heise County Park covers more than 900 acres with over ten miles of trails through oak and pine. The wild turkeys and deer treat the campsites as their own.
Santa Ynez
Santa Ynez anchors its own valley, and the valley runs on wine. Sunstone Winery pours Bordeaux and Rhone-style bottles from a French-inspired villa that also rents rooms and serves dinner. Roblar Winery and Vineyards keeps a different mood under large oak trees, with food built on farm ingredients and live music in the warmer months. Eight miles out, the Lake Cachuma Recreation Area covers boating, fishing, hiking, and camping. Back in town, the Santa Ynez Chumash Museum holds the longer story, the heritage of the Chumash people who lived in this valley for thousands of years before the vineyards arrived.
Borrego Springs
Borrego Springs is the only town in California entirely surrounded by a state park, and the silence is one of the reasons people come. The park is Anza-Borrego, California's largest, covering roughly 650,000 acres of canyon, badland, and palm oasis with more than 500 miles of dirt road and over 100 miles of trail. The Borrego Palm Canyon Trail runs three miles round trip to a grove of California fan palms, the state's only native palm, with bighorn sheep sometimes watching from the slopes. Out on the desert floor, the Galleta Meadows sculptures number more than 130 metal animals, including a serpent that runs 350 feet and crosses a road. Borrego Springs was also California's first International Dark Sky Community, which is the official way of saying the streetlights lose to the stars.
Wrightwood
Wrightwood sits at 6,000 feet in the San Gabriel Mountains on what used to be an apple orchard, with pine forest and cool air standing in for the valley heat below. The Pacific Crest Trail runs straight through the middle of town, so long-distance hikers regularly walk down the main street to resupply. The Evergreen Café and Raccoon Saloon handles the comfort food and the drinks. Three miles out, the Jackson Lake Picnic Area has a small mountain lake good for fishing under tall pines, and nearby Table Mountain Campground keeps more than 100 sites and a 27-hole disc golf course. The hard option is the Mount Baden-Powell Trail, a 7.6-mile round trip climbing to a 9,400-foot summit.
The Quiet Side Of Southern California
The towns on this list run on different engines. Cambria, Avila Beach, Pismo Beach, and Carpinteria work the coast, while Solvang and Santa Ynez run on wine and Borrego Springs runs on desert and dark sky. Julian and Lake Isabella keep their mining past close at hand, and Ojai, Oak View, and Wrightwood lean on the mountains around them. What they share is the part that does not show up in a brochure, the willingness to let an afternoon go by without filling it. That is the whole point of the drive.
