Out & About
More hippie than hipster, the Kava Lounge in Middletown specializes in natural, organic cocktails and has played a significant role in cultivating San Diego’s electronic, experimental, and world-music scenes. The lounge was among the first …
San Diego’s Embarcadero, the place of departure and arrival for vessels as small as fishing skiffs and as large as ocean liners, defines the city’s connection to the watery worlds of San Diego Bay and …
An avocado festival – in Hawaii? Yes, and I just had to give it a try. While waiting for my plane to land on the Big Island, I’d almost finished reading the airline magazine when …
Rustic signs along some of Clairemont’s and Bay Park’s major streets call attention to one of the oldest designated open-space parks in San Diego: the 900-acre Tecolote Canyon Natural Park. The park’s unpaved service roads …
I’m sitting on a bench in the San Diego Museum of Art, which has just opened an exhibition by the British painter Howard Hodgkin. Pretty quiet here, only four other warm bodies, one of them …
Built in 1927 as San Diego’s second Bank of America, the building at the corner of University and Van Dyke in City Heights changed over from Nancy’s Pub to Black Cat Bar last month. High …
Remote Sheep Canyon, secreted in the middle reaches of Coyote Canyon in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, features some of the most rugged yet beautiful terrain in San Diego County. The canyon has two main forks …
Your impression of Lake Jennings may be strongly colored by the season in which you choose to visit it — a not-unusual circumstance in many of San Diego County’s inland, low-elevation locales. Summer’s heat and …
Kadan at 30th and Adams takes its name from the town where owner Chris Heaney met his wife at a smoky café in 1994. Inspired by a Czech discotheque that played eclectic music to a …
The sprawling Chino Hills State Park east of Los Angeles offers 14,000 acres of open space for hikers, equestrians, and mountain bikers to roam (note: dogs are not welcome). Unfortunately, the November 2008 “Freeway Complex …
The San Diego Zoo Safari Park (in case you didn’t know, it’s the former Wild Animal Park) in Escondido sprawls over an 1800-acre expanse chosen for its resemblance to Africa’s most productive wildlife areas. Make …
If the Cryptkeeper opened a speakeasy, he’d lurch over to Cherry Bomb first to take notes. Wedged between a laundromat and a taco shop, the Banker’s Hill drinking dungeon sees black brick and red walls …
When in 1853 Admiral Perry and what the Japanese called his “black fleet” (the ships were painted black and their coal-stoked engines puffed black smoke) sailed into Yokohoma Harbor, he couldn’t have known he’d be …
Like caterpillars marching to their own drummers, the rock-ribbed mountain ridges of the Anza-Borrego Desert nose this way and that, eventually finding their roots in the sand-drowned valleys sloping downward into the Salton Basin. The …
Soda Bar opened in late 2008 at the former City Heights location of dubious dive Chasers. Set between a car lot and a Mexican herb shop on El Cajon Boulevard, the bar hosts local and …
One of the largest vernal pools in California (39 acres at maximum capacity) lies in a shallow depression atop near-flat Mesa de Colorado, in southwest Riverside County’s Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve. Small vernal pools …