52 weekend getaways: Rest and relaxation

Santa Cruz

Three-hundred and forty-five driving miles north of Los Angeles, 72 miles south of San Francisco and many leagues to the left of Middle America, Santa Cruz calls out to newcomers like a lazy mermaid atop Monterey Bay. With tie-dyed scales.

“Dude,” this mermaid drawls. “What’s your hurry?”

What with the redwoods, the shapely waves, the historic beachfront amusement park, the barking sea lions under the old wharf and the fluttering monarch butterflies that alight here every fall, Santa Cruz has always possessed plenty to lure tourists.

-- Christopher Reynolds

Read more: Santa Cruz’s affordable luxuries

Planning your trip:

Santa Cruz County Conference and Visitors Council,
www.santacruzca.org

(Chris Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

March 7, 2014 2:02 AM PT

You road-less-traveled types may adore Catalina. During high season, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Southern Californians flock to this overgrown rock like Bostonians to Martha’s Vineyard. Californians visit Catalina’s hilltop Wrigley Mansion (now the pleasant Inn on Mt. Ada), attend movie premieres and Kenny Loggins concerts at its landmark Casino Ballroom (where Duke Ellington once played) and take bus tours through its vast backcountry (still occupied by real buffalo herds).

These are all legacies of chewing-gum baron William Wrigley Jr., who bought the whole 76-square-mile island for a couple of million bucks sight unseen in 1919 and shaped it into his vision of an offshore hinterland and equestrian-class resort.

There’s a sunny nine-hole golf course here too (reportedly the oldest in Southern California), a triathlon and an October jazz festival. But come winter, when tourism plummets to a fraction of its fair-weather numbers, Catalina may be something closer to a secret getaway.

-- Jordan Rane

Planning your trip:

Explore Catalina’s 42,135 acres of rugged outback the easy way, in an open-air Mercedes Unimog or a 1950s Flxible bus ([310] 510-8687, www.visitcatalinaisland.com). Hiking in the backcountry requires a permit (free) from the Catalina Island Conservancy ([310] 510-2595, www.catalinaconservancy.org).

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Hotel rooms often are boring places you have to put up with just to explore some place exciting. At Nick’s Cove, a new complex on Tomales Bay an hour or so north of San Francisco, you could be perfectly happy spending most of your time just exploring the hotel rooms.

Not that you’d actually call any of these places “hotel rooms.”

A string of a dozen cabins, cottages and other assorted structures stretched alongside Highway 1 just north of the town of Point Reyes, Nick’s Cove is a kind of Ralph Lauren meets Northern California fever dream of a resort.

-- Russ Parsons

Planning your trip:

Nick’s Cove on Tomales Bay
23240 Highway 1, Marshall, Calif.
(415) 663-1033.
Cabins from $225 to $695.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)