“It was an absolutely wild place,” she said. “But it was not in the guidebook, and we would never have known about it.”
The veteran road tripper also suggested avoiding national parks in the summer. Instead, check out some of the state and county parks, many of which have lodges.
“They are not as grand as going to Yosemite, but they are absolutely beautiful,” she said. “In Las Vegas, I found a state park called Red Rock Canyon. It was beautiful, and there were no people there.”
While planning your route, she strongly recommends getting a map and reading it closely to find interesting places 20 miles off your route.
That way, instead of heading straight for a tourist destination, such as a well-known wine valley, you may discover another attraction off the beaten path, such as a trail highlighting whiskey or hard cider purveyors and makers.
For her research, Carla Flaherty of Santa Rosa follows the My Home is California page on Facebook and subscribes to “Only in …” lists for states she is going to visit.
“I read Atlas Obscura (an online travel magazine) and Roadside America (an app for roadside attractions and oddities) and anything else I can find,” she said. “The more you know, the more you will see.”
The Visit California website (visitcalifornia.com) also offers a 2021 “California Road Trips” guide, for free.
Lodging ins and outs
When the Valdovinoses set out on their cross-country trek, they had a reservation at the Grand Canyon, but after that, they planned to get a hotel wherever they landed that day. That strategy didn’t work for long, as they found themselves staying in substandard hotels in bad neighborhoods.
“We learned a lesson,” Lisa said. “We ended up reserving a few nights before we arrived at the next location.”
If you have an RV or tent for camping, you’ll have more options.
Dustin Rogge of Forestville, founder of Trailhead Vans, rents out three camper vans based in Santa Rosa and Lake Tahoe. This summer, he reserved a van for his own family to camp along the Central Coast and up in Humboldt Redwoods State Park.
In Cambria, the family stayed at a state campground, then booked a more luxurious spot through Hipcamp (hipcamp.com), a peer-to-peer camping reservation service.
“Campgrounds get booked so fast and so early,” he said. “That’s one of the big constraints that I hear from my customers.”
Although the Hipcamp site was a bit more expensive, Rogge was able to book it at the last minute. The other benefit was that it had more character and amenities than a public campground, including a communal kitchen and fire pits, a swimming hole and a bespoke bathroom lined in wood.
Rogge, a professor of hospitality and business at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, also suggested crowd sourcing from your own social network to find lodging and other travel information.
“Then you are getting insight from people in your own social circle,” he said.
In the summer, Rogge tends to look for lodging on the periphery of popular spots and often stays in the national forests that surround national parks like Yosemite Valley.
A few years ago, Rogge and his family were on vacation in Lake Tahoe and needed to find a place with good air quality due to nearby wildfires. That’s how he discovered the Sierra Butte area, just off the well-worn path north of Truckee.
“Gold Lake is up there, which is cool, and there are some old-timey resorts like Sardine Lake Resort,” he said. “We went past Prosser Reservoir and drove for an hour, and that brought us up to that region.”
Fuel for the body
When Rogge was visiting Cambria this summer, the serious shortage of labor in the hospitality industry reinforced the importance of making reservations, even at restaurants during high season.
His family stopped by a nice bistro for dinner, and the owner said he had a table open but only one cook and two servers, so it was going to be a long time before Rogge and his family would get their food.
“I saw that over and over again,” he said. “This is the peak season for restaurants.”
To help ease the burden on restaurants and support them year-round, he suggested waiting until October, and preferably in midweek, to go to popular areas.
To find out where to eat in new places he doesn’t know, Rogge likes to ask the local experts and people who are dining next to him.
“If I’m having breakfast, I ask the people there where to have lunch,” he said. “If I’m having lunch, I ask where to have dinner.”
Also not afraid to ask questions, Gershowitz likes to hang out in parks and strike up conversations with the locals about what they like to do and where they like to eat.
