Aquatic adventures

My friend Kate snapped this lovely photo at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. The aquarium is a great outing – plenty to do, but manageable too. Springtime fare ranges from free Shark Lagoon Nights on Fridays to boat tours of one of the word’s most active ports  to whale watching expeditions  (through May 31) in the waters near San Pedro Channel. 

More on whale watching: Check out the Kids Off the Couch website for other whale treks along the Southern California coast.  Or head to Malibu’s Point Dume, where you often can stand out along the shore and watch the California Gray Whales cruise by. No boat required.

The Open Road

Time magazine’s cover story on the Dalai Lama comes from Santa Barbara author and travel writer extraordinaire Pico Iyer. “As fans of his travel writings know, Pico’s curiosity has led him to nearly every corner of the globe, but he has always found himself returning to the monk in Dharamsala…” writes Time managine editor Richard Stengel.

“Now Pico offers the definitive portrait of His Holiness in this week’s cover story, which is adapted from his new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. `Over the years,’ Pico says, `I’ve been struck by how practically he’s adapted his message to the times and the worldwide audience. He’s thought about his positions more deeply and more rigorously than anyone I’ve ever met.’ ” Read “A Monk’s Struggle” here. 

Knopf releases The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama this week. (More stories: Philadelphia Inquirer , Fresh Air, and The New Yorker.) Pico will be discussing his new book on April 26 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA and May 19 at the Santa Barbara Arts and Lecture Series. ”I do see this as a travel book,” he says in an interview with World Hum, “and when I think of travel, and any of the travel books I’ve written, the real meaning of them is trying to see the world through different eyes. It’s a journey into a different perspective for me. “

Pico, a contributor to the My California anthology, also penned a wonderful passage about his favorite drive through the Santa Barbara hills for my book Great Escapes: Southern California.

36 hours in Pasadena

The New YorkTimes features a family-friendly weekend escape to the City of Roses. Jennifer Steinhauer stops by the Norton Simon Museum, Distant Lands Travel Bookstore and the Kidspace Children’s Museum. She wisely suggests spending an entire day at the nearby Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, which is magical this time of year. Check out the 36-hour slide show here.

Don’t miss this: The Huntington just opened its $18 million Chinese Garden, Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, this past month. Recent stories: LA Times, Wall Street Journal.

Soul of the City

Thumbing through a map book one day, Los Angeles painter J. Michael Walker noticed just how many of the city’s streets are named for saints. Santa Monica Boulevard. Santa Rita Street. San Ysidro Drive. San Vicente Boulevard. San Julian Place. San Remo Way. He eventually chronicled 103 saintly streets in all.

“Walker had a brilliant idea: he found all the L.A. streets named for saints, retrieved their stories and illustrated them in works that draw from Goya and folk art and 1920s real estate ads,” says Peter Fish, an editor at Sunset Magazine. “…each saint street tells a story, tragic, hopeful, beautiful, violent, that together form a remarkably powerful panorama of L.A. You’ll never look at your Thomas Brothers guide in the same way.”

Heyday Books has just published Walker’s book, All the Saints of the City of the Angels: Seeking the Soul of L.A. on its Streets. The Autry National Center at Griffith Park has a companion art exhibit that runs through September 7.

“The saints’ names are common enough, we drive them every day,” Walker says in an interview with The New York Times. “But we see them without looking, without thinking of the resonance of names.”

Weekend Cowboy

The drive up the mountain to Rankin Ranch is just nine miles long. Yet it seems a much longer trek as you slowly climb the narrow, winding highway with its hairpin turns, stunning sunset views, and army of fearless cattle that snack along the slopes and regularly amble into the middle of the road.

Cows far outnumber humans in this pristine corner of Southern California’s Tehachapi Mountains, just two and a half hours—and another universe entirely—from Los Angeles. It takes a good 30 minutes to reach the top of the mountain, where the two-lane highway twists through a final set of curves, then spills into a lush green valley. Just up ahead you’ll find Quarter Circle U Rankin Ranch, a 31,000-acre slice of old California heaven.

They’ve raised cattle on the ranch since Walter Rankin imported the first herd of white-faced Herefords in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, and cattle is still the family business. For the past four decades, the Rankin clan also opens the ranch six months of the year to weekend cowboys and nature-lovers.

Ranch Ranch starts its new season in mid-March. It’s one of the destinations featured in my book, Great Escapes: Southern California. Here’s a story I wrote about the ranch for the Los Angeles Times Travel Section a while back.