Southern California Explorations – Part 2

Welcome back for California adventures part 2! Check out part 1 here.

For the rest of the vacation, I rented a car with my mom and drove from Palm Springs, to Los Angeles, to San Diego, and back to Palm Springs. Los Angeles is a beautiful city, despite the abnormally long traffic lights (please keep an eye out for a separate blog post for LA next week!).

To start off the small road trip, we adventured up to the Hollywood sign! The trail was well maintained, as it is mostly for horses, and there are about 50 miles of trails up there. As you can see, you can’t actually go near the sign for obvious reasons, but the view from the top was beautiful. The trail signs warned us of fire danger and rattlesnakes.

Next stop – Malibu. Stopping in the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area, which is surprisingly large and engulfs the mountains all the way to the coast, we visited the Charmlee Wilderness Park, and made some coyote friends. Okay – friends is a strong word, and we did carry rocks in our hands incase they wanted to pay us a visit.

We also visited the Pacific Ocean at Lee Carrillo State Park, right off the PCH. It was very warm, so the sea was littered with surfers. The tidal pools were rich with sea anemone and the beach was littered with kelp.

Next, we took the Pacific Coast Highway down towards San Diego, where we visited the San Diego Zoo. As with LA, there will be a different blog post outlining sustainability practices and education within the zoo, which will be posted next week!