San Diego
in California

California at its most effortlessly liveable. The weather is so consistently good it barely warrants mentioning, the Pacific is warm enough to swim in for most of the year, and the city spreads across a series of distinct neighbourhoods that each have their own texture: North Park with its craft breweries and independent restaurants, La Jolla with its coves and cliffs and the kind of light that makes painters move here permanently, the Gaslamp Quarter where the Victorian architecture has been preserved with more success than most. The fish tacos at a counter in Ocean Beach are as good as the food gets in California, which is saying something. Tijuana is twenty minutes south by trolley for those who want to push the eating further. San Diego does not shout. It simply continues, agreeably, to be one of the finest places to spend time on the west coast.