Getting the flavor of...California’s Lost Coast, and more

California’s Lost Coast

Northern California is home to “one of the country’s best natural secrets,” said Adam Baer in Men’s Journal. “The Lost Coast”—so known because it’s the “only significant stretch” of California without a shoreline highway—strings together rocky shoals, coastal redwoods, and black-sand beaches directly beneath towering verdant mountains. To explore the area, we drove south from Eureka, Calif., on “meandering” roads that took us through small towns and past the “adventure surfer’s paradise” Shelter Cove until we reached Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, “an elk-spotted wonderland of redwood groves and prairies.” There are too many great hikes along the 80-mile-long coastline to list, but one of the region’s true highlights is best viewed from a car. The Avenue of the Giants, in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, is a 31-mile road that passes through “some of the tallest, thickest trees in the world.”

The artsy side of Dallas

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Look past Dallas’s “ten-gallon-hat/big-hair stereotypes,” and what you find might surprise you, said Kristie Ramirez in National Geographic Traveler. Various recent “arts-focused” initiatives have changed the city’s fabric, turning the existing arts district into “a cultural nexus worthy of Dallas’s bravado.” The game-changer was the 2009 opening of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, a complex that includes a symphony center and a Rem Koolhaas opera house in candy-apple red. Nearby stand Renzo Piano’s Nasher Sculpture Center and the celebrated Dallas Museum of Art, and the whole district is now linked to a “nightlife-focused uptown” by a five-acre park that’s built above an underground freeway. If your taste runs more toward organically grown neighborhoods, head for the Bishop Arts District in Oak Cliff. The area has been “recently gentrified by artists, designers, boutique owners, and restaurateurs.”