Travel • Living • Design
Places: US State
After California's wettest winter on record, Yosemite Valley ran louder than usual — every fall at full volume, granite walls disappearing into mist, a rainbow waiting at the end of it. A spring trip through rain, the Ahwahnee's fireplaces, and a detour to a fig-tree kitchen in Gold Rush country.
San Juan Capistrano holds the ruins of the Great Stone Church alongside the state's oldest building still in use — a single site where the mission system's architectural formula, and its human cost, are both fully legible. The same quadrangle logic repeats from Sonoma to Santa Barbara, and echoes once more, without the mission itself, in Old Town San Diego.
Hearst Castle is 165 rooms of Spanish Colonial, Moorish, Gothic, and Neoclassical detail, built over 28 years by the same architect who designed two buildings I've walked past my whole adult life in Sacramento. A family stop along the PCH, and a quieter return fourteen years later.