A shiny new CaliforniaAuthors.com debuted this week with a fresh design and an easy-to-navigate new site.

Kate Cohen and I first launched CaliforniaAuthors in 2002 and we’ve built some nice resources for exploring the Golden State. You’ll find a growing and varied library of book excerpts and essays by California writers; a directory of California novelists, nonfiction writers and poets; and listings pointing to independent bookstores, West Coast Publishers, literary events, book festivals, and more. CaliforniaAuthors also teamed up with Angel City Press to create the remarkable My California anthology, which benefits the California Arts Council and writing programs for children throughout the state. Browse here.

When my husband and I plotted a monthlong trip to Europe, I spent weeks researching every detail. I amassed a bedside mountain of travel books. I quizzed friends about their adventures in the French countryside, scoured travel websites, and rented movies set in our intended destinations (I watched American Dreamer so many times I felt like a regular at Paris’ swanky Hôtel de Crillon). By the time we left, we had an adventurous, offbeat itinerary filled with cool new restaurants to try and treks to out-of-the-way corners I’d missed on previous trips abroad.

But for getaways close to home, I’ve always tended to go for the easy and familiar. Over and over. It’s just so effortless to say, let’s go to Palm Springs, which invariably means checking into the same desert resort my family always visits, with its comfortable, airy rooms and twisting water slide that keeps the kids entertained. Enjoyable, yes. But after the umpteenth trip, hardly exciting.

Then last year I was asked to write a travel book of great weekend getaways in Southern California.

Goodbye travel rut.

Suddenly I began looking at Southern California through fresh eyes. A travel writer’s eyes. Nearly every week I went someplace different: Date nights. Day trips. Weekend treks to my favorite spots and to places I’d always meant to visit, like Cold Springs Tavern near Santa Barbara.

My husband and two children often came along and they had a blast kayaking, horseback riding, swimming, snorkeling, hand-feeding emus, and roaming luscious nature spots from San Diego to the Central Coast. Other times I set out on the road (or train) alone with California writers such as Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Kem Nunn, Gidget, and the Steinbecks (John and son Thomas) as my guides.

I sampled my way through two wine countries, played blackjack in the afternoon, cooked alongside a great chef, savored amazing farmers’ markets and ethnic groceries all over, swam with schools of bright, teeming fish, and strapped on water-skis for the first time in years.

I recently wrote about five of my favorite SoCal road trips for the Los Angeles Times and I wanted to share these quick getaways as summer approaches. The story, and this handy Google map, offer a taste of the adventures in my new book, Great Escapes: Southern California, which is being released on Monday.

World traveler Robert Helgeson shares this photo from his home library. My new book, Great Escapes: Southern California, is the fourth book from the right. “As you can see it occupies space along with all of our other treasured guide books,” he says.

Thank you, Robert. I’m honored!

Next weekend is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a sprawling outdoor affair that regularly draws 100,000 book lovers to the UCLA campus every spring. (Who says people in LA don’t read?!)

The festival is great fun. You’ll see throngs of people lined up in the sunshine outside lecture halls, waiting — and obviously excited — to join conversations about current events, current fiction, and the latest offerings from sci-fi masters and chick-lit queens. Poets give impassioned readings under the big tent outside Powell Library. Open-air stages feature celebrated chefs and celebrities touting their children’s books. I love to browse the dozens of booksellers, publishers, museums, non-profit foundations, and retailers who set up shop along UCLA’s grassy plazas.

More than 400 authors appear on Saturday and Sunday (tickets to daytime events are free), so you’ll find plenty of great choices. A festival map is here.

I’ll be at the Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27, signing copies of My California: Journeys by Great Writers from 1 to 2 pm with Edward Humes and Veronique de Turenne. Please be sure to stop by the Angel City Press Booth (#332, near Royce Hall) and say hello.

Laura Cohen pulls out a tiny composition book and scribbles madly as we meander through Laguna Canyon Wilderness Park.

She is busily, energetically, joyfully chronicling the triumphant return of the spring wildflowers that practically disappeared from the canyon — and much of Southern California’s other parched wild spaces — in the past few years.

What a difference a few inches of gentle rain makes. This spring the hills are different. Better. Wetter. So lush that Laguna Canyon looks like someone rolled out the green carpet. The blooms seem to multiply overnight and Cohen’s flower journal grows daily with them, the park naturalist’s excitement palpable with each new speck of color bursting amid the grasslands and coastal sage scrub.

Cohen leads the way as we savor stands of willowy coast sunflowers swaying in the afternoon breeze near a couple of inviting picnic tables. Another flash of sweet yellow catches the sun and our attention: small violets called Johnny-Jump-Ups. We stop to watch a hummingbird gorge on flaming orange monkey flowers, then we roam past fuchsia-flowered gooseberry plants, white popcorn flowers, tangles of prickly wild cucumbers, and purple phacelia poking out between the rocks. Farther up along the trails, bright ruby poppies dance along Serrano Ridge. In all, Cohen catalogs more than twenty different wildflowers. Her prized discovery: delicate pink clumps of owl’s clover. “It’s very rare,” she says, “one of my favorite plants.”

Across Southern California, from coastal fields and hillsides to the desert’s sprawling wild lands, botanists and park rangers and flower lovers of all species are reveling in the best wildflower season in recent memory. It’s a great time of year to pack a picnic lunch and just wander.

I wrote about Southern California’s wildflowers for the Los Angeles Times Magazine this weekend and you can read the story here.

Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, of course, is a magical place any time of year. Other wildflower spots include the California Poppy Reserve in the Antelope Valley; Anza-Borrego Desert State Park; and Joshua Tree National Park. The wildflower season is expected to last into May.

Journalist (and poker buddy) Michelle Nicolosi is getting reading for a cross-country adventure and poses this question at LinkedIn: What’s the coolest off-the-beaten-path place in the U.S.?

Check out the responses (including mine) and add your two cents here.

*The photo above comes from a remote corner of SoCal that also would make a fine addition to Michelle’s list — the Rankin Ranch. It’s so far off-the-beaten path that rush hour consists of your car and a herd of cows.

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.

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.

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.

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.”