Global travel booking website Skyscanner has named its top five destinations for solo travel this winter, and a Northern California favorite the Sonoma Coast made the list. The Sonoma Coast invites a different kind of stillness, the guide notes, praising the rugged shoreline as an antidote to crowded itineraries and overplanned escapes. The roundup also includes Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, Tangier Island in Virginia, Olympic National Park in Washington and Red River Gorge in Kentucky.
For travelers looking to get to know the many-varied charms of the Golden State, discovering it through the best beaches in California is never a bad idea. The state's coastline spans a vast 3,427 miles after all. Among its 420 public beautiful beaches are plentiful opportunities to swim, lay out, look at tide pools, surf to your heart's content, or watch the sunset.
I may be a bit biased, but I consider the California coastline to be the most scenic and diverse route in the U.S. As a native to the state, I've taken more than 20 road trips over the years, traversing desert terrain, budding vineyards, and cliff-hugging highways that tower above the Pacific Ocean. And though I love the colossal redwood forests in northern California and the gleaming coastline that cradles the state's southern end, there's one road trip I always return to for its access to some of the state's best wineries, restaurants, and charismatic hotels.
Highway 1 is an emotional experience for so many people, and its early reopening reconnects the full wonder of Ragged Point, San Simeon and Cambria with our neighbors to the north in Monterey,
California marked a milestone this month with the return of an uninterrupted Highway 1 through the perilous, yet spectacular cliffs of Big Sur. The famed coastal road was closed for more than three years after two major landslides buried the two-lane highway, and it took unprecedented engineering might and precarious debris removal to once again connect northern Big Sur with its southern neighbors.
The Holiday Happiness Index study, which was conducted in collaboration with Natalie Dattilo-Ryan, a Harvard-affiliated clinical psychologist and holistic happiness expert, looked at 50 destinations throughout the world and ranked them across five "feel good" factors, including sunlight, quality sleep, a healthy diet, time in nature, and physical exercise. To determine which are the sunniest, the study also took into account each place's total hours of sunlight per year.
