Travel Swellness: My SoCal life

March 14, 2016

In November, one of my besties and I were both writing about SoCal for work, so we got to fly together to LAX and from there, we had a car rental to rip around Long Beach, Huntington Beach and Carlsbad. I’ve been to L.A. a couple of times, and I have to say, I didn’t care for it much so I wasn’t really sure of what to expect of this Southern California trip…but maybe my tastes have changed (I think those two really awful winters in Toronto really did a number on me and made me love sunshine even more) or maybe it was being mostly in part of L.A. that were very touristy on previous trips, but I loved every bit of this Cali trip and it made me want to move there.

One of the biggest highlights for me: I got to finally take a surf lesson. We did this in Huntington Beach, and while I did not manage to get up on the board, our awesome teacher, Patrick, said the waves were terrible and that it’s much easier when the surf is better. So I’ll just have to go back and do a lesson when the surf is better.

In Huntington Beach, we crashed at the Shorebreak Hotel, which is Kimpton property, and it was such a fun and cute spot, with the friendliest staff — good customer service is really important to me, and every interaction at this hotel was great. You feel welcome here. I did not want to check out.

In Long Beach, we had a gondolier serenade us in Italian…after he turned down my request for Backstreet Boys…We took the gondola cruise at night, which meant all of the photos turned out terrible. Alas….

In Carlsbad, the last stop of our trip, we were a bit tuckered out and spent most of our time on the wide stretch of beach and took in the awesome sunsets. The most active thing we did was rent electric bikes and I remember how free and incredible  it felt coasting along above the beach and feeling truly and wonderfully happy right then.

That’s not everything we did on our SoCal tour. You can read more about the fantastic spots to visit in my story on AmongMen.com, and I’ll save the other items for another travel story.

Filed under: Travel Swellness