By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor

I don’t consider myself an especially vain person. But I confess that part of the reason I gave up skiing years ago was that I didn’t have cool enough gear for it. The way-too-big black snow overalls that my husband picked up on sale did absolutely nothing for me, except to make me look pregnant all over again. And my vintage ’80s synthetic jacket? Let’s not even go there. I made up all kinds of excuses not to go skiing, but the truth was, I didn’t want to look like the big dufus in the totally uncool duds on the slopes.

Then I discovered Powderhorn, a ski gear company with duds so stylish I’m tempted to buy a bunch more and move to the mountains. They’re flattering, they’re functional, and they’ve got that subtly western retro thing going on that I dig.

My move to the mountains can wait because as it turns out, I can wear my Powderhorn gear at home in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve been wearing my down vest throughout this chilly April. It makes me feel like a mountain girl transplanted, even though I’m more like a mom on the coast.

The best part, though, is that when you wear this stuff you’re playing a part in western history. Originally founded in 1972 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, it had almost a cult following in the Europe as well as the U.S. before the brand fell off the map after its founder died a tragic death. In 2007 a few devotees decided to bring Powderhorn back, and now it’s starting to pop up here and there, often eliciting an excited reaction from folks who remember the brand from way back when. Translation: you’ll look very much in the know all decked out in your duds.

It’s a story of a western classics reinvented, of a comeback kid. Not unlike a magazine you might know.

By Peter Fish, Sunset Editor-at-Large

I just had a back-stage tour of the new California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park, the Renzo Piano-designed, sustainable, grass-roofed shrine to scientific inquiry set to open in late September.  I didn’t get to wear a hard hat, but otherwise the tour was great.

Here’s what I learned.

The Swamp lives. The ornate pit that houses the Academy’s alligators is still there, a pleasingly dank and crepuscular focal point for the new piazza at the building’s center. Now, however, you can also go downstairs and peer at the alligators underwater, just like you were at some 60s Mad Men poolside cocktail lounge where you gaped through portholes at synchronized swimmers. Except that these are alligators, and you’re not drinking a mai tai.   

The African Hall is still there. “We did lots of focus groups,” Stephanie Stone, the Academy’s Director of Communications told me.   “People loved the alligators and they loved the African Hall. We had to keep those.” In the hall’s case, all the dioramas have been carefully restored; the largest of them will now hold actually living (as opposed to taxidermied) African penguins, splashing around in an actual (as opposed to painted) pool. 

The Foucault Pendulum still swings. For the reasons noted above. People love a pendulum, even if nobody knows who Foucault was. 

Everything else about the Academy is new and pretty damn spectacular. The piazza is light-filled and gives you the sense of still being out in Golden Gate Park even though you’re inside a building. Housed in a four-story dome, the walk-through Rainforests of the World lets you travel from the Amazon to Borneo to Madagascar to Costa Rica, all of them suitably humid. The Philippine Coral Reef is the second largest living coral reef exhibit in the world. On my visit it was one of the few exhibits with some animals already in occupancy: rays and skates zipping around looking elegant and menacing in the way rays and skates do. (The rest of the Academy’s 38,000 living fish and reptiles and insects and birds will arrive over the next few months, transported from the Academy’s temporary downtown S.F. location and elsewhere. And you thought your moves were a pain..)

As the literal and figurative topper, there’s the Academy’s Living Roof, which has already drawn major press attention: 2.5 sustainable, eco-friendly rooftop acres planted in native California grasses and flowers. What’s great is that observation platforms let you look at the roof close up. And even now, when the plants aren’t fully grown in, it’s beguiling: a whimsical Teletubby-like landscape nonetheless tied to its site, the undulations echoing the topography of Twin Peaks and Golden Gate Heights just to the south. I’ve found the location for this year’s family Christmas card. (If you want to know more about grass roofs, check out Sunset’s 2007 story, Eaves of Grass.)

The Academy is set to open September 27. For updates, visit www.calacademy.org

by MacKenzie Geidt, Sunset assistant travel editor

Wanna go to Morocco?  Yeah, so do I.  Desperately.  Maybe it was my former stint as a belly dancer that inspired my absolute love and fascination for North African culture (I'm sparing you pictures from that unfortunate era in my past—trust me, they were YMCA classes, so it really wasn't what you might be thinking...)

But THIS is the closest that I've come to Marrakech, and it happens to be in downtown LA: welcome to the world of the Figueroa Hotel....transporting enough to make you feel like you've crossed continents...(so transporting that leaving the hotel and coming upon the Staples Center across the street makes for extreme cultural confusion....)



Doesn't this remind you of a Paul Bowles novel?  Or The English Patient?  Or a sultan's palace?    If you had a harem, wouldn't you want them to stay here? (no surprise that my influences are all fictional...)

Many of the rooms are named after Moroccan cities...the one above happens to be The Medina.  The building started as a YWCA in 1925 (do you think they offered belly dancing?) before becoming a hotel after the Great Depression.

Even if you can't spend the night, you should definitely stop in for a drink, Casablanca style (remember Rick's Cafe?), at the bar by the pool.  Celebs have been known to haunt the terrace in the early morning hours for secret trysts, and frankly, you should do the same.  It's gotta be one of the most romantic (and private!) watering holes in LA.   

                                                
OK, yes, you're still in LA after all. And you do have to use your imagination if you're expecting Bogie to show up.  But if you're craving a lush Saharan oasis, until you can go for real, this is it, folks.  All the fun without the sandstorms. Play it again, Sam.

by Matthew Jaffe, Sunset senior writer 

Southern California has heated up over the past few days but before spring ends and the hills turn gold you can still experience the best wildflower season since the big rain year of 2005.

Now that my school days are long since past I’m no believer in grade inflation, so I’ll give the 2008 bloom a solid B, just shy of a B+.

Much to my regret, I never made it out to the desert but I have hiked several nearby trails in Topanga State Park and elsewhere in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

The current bloom is especially notable because during last year’s record low rainfall, the hills barely greened up and wildflowers never showed up at all.

Get out now and you'll see a transition taking place. The local mountains offer a mix of lingering early blooming plants (such as bush sunflower and lupine) with chaparral yucca and other harbingers of late spring.

The creamy white clusters of the chaparral shrub chamise have added texture and definition to valleys and ridgelines, and some trails practically pulsate with the orange and yellow of sticky monkey flower and the pink and rose whorls of purple sage— as well zillions (not an official population figure) of happily buzzing bees.

The bees are apparently having a big year too because a friend who discovered a swarm in his chimney was told by a bee removal expert that our area has never been so busy.

This has also proven to be an enormous year for non-native mustard. I’ve been on trails where the mustard stands almost eight feet tall and completely covers hillsides. I hate to admit it but the mustard display can be gorgeous this time of year. Still, there’s no forgetting the major impacts that it has on native plants and animal habitat.

Farther out, the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve is hanging on with one of its better blooms in recent years. And for a comprehensive look at regional hotspots, check out the Theodore Payne Foundation’s Wildflower Hotline.

By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

This is Sunset’s week for blogging about the San Joaquin Valley (see MacKenzie Geidt’s cool valley train trip, below.)

I used to spend a fair amount of time in the San Joaquin and even though a lot of people find it a hard place to love I came to love it. I like the way the orange groves press the  foothills around Porterville, and the big valley oaks that shade Visalia.  I like the oil rigs around Coalinga and Hanford’s town square. I even came to like the valley’s climatic extremes: the clobbered-the-second-you get-out-of-the-car heat in July, the damp clasp of the Tule fog in January. 

Because April is National Poetry Month—you knew that, right, you’ve been up every night celebrating?—I want to recommend a poet who does the valley proud: Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. She’s not unknown—toward the end of her long life she gained some deserved fame—but I hadn’t read her until a couple of months ago.  And when I did I was stunned, the way you are when you step out of that car into the valley heat.

McDaniel was part of the world John Steinbeck wrote about in Grapes of Wrath, except that she lived it first-hand.  She came to California from Oklahoma at age 18 in 1936.   And for the next decades she worked, hard, as a farm worker, sometimes as a maid, scribbling poetry on grain sacks and scraps of paper, not able to publish anything until she was in her 50s. But by the end of her life—she died last year at age 88—she had published 25 small books of verse. You find her work in anthologies like Dana Gioia’s California Poetry. Or, better yet, get one of her own books—say Borrowed Coats or The Last Dust Storm—from her publisher, Hanging Loose Press. 

McDaniel’s poems are the ideal thing to read if you think that contemporary poetry is obscure, pallid, and self-absorbed. They’re the ideal thing to read if you don’t think about contemporary poetry at all.  McDaniel’s poems shimmer with heartbreak and tragedy and a lot of deadpan fun, and the valley is there, flat and broad and unforgettable, on every page.  Reading her is like listening to a favorite aunt at a family picnic, the one who knows all the good stories the other grown-ups won’t tell.

Here’s one of my favorites, possibly the best poem ever written about a pancake house:

WATCHING TRUCK DRIVERS AT PANCAKE HOUSE
Boys
I always order pancakes
he told his buddies
slathered butter on them
poured syrup
like thick maple rain
Nothing much a cook
can do to ruin a pancake
if the stove don’t blow up

By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor

Yesterday I wrote about cool things you should do in Paia. Here’s what you should NOT do:

Bike down Haleakala. Hundreds of yahoos pay top dollar to get up at O-dark-thirty a.m., squeeze into a van with a bunch of strangers, drive all the way up to Haleakala National Park to freeze while watching the sunrise, and then ride bike cruiser bikes the 38 miles down back to town. A friend who lives right along the highway says he sees people crash right outside his house all the time. Don’t be a dork: skip it.

If you are wondering where you should ride, I suggest taking the road less traveled: start in the tiny upcountry town of Keokea and ride 15 or so miles out to the Kula region of East Maui. (Or however far you want to go; just turn around when you’re tired.)

Here’s why:

1. Because up here you’d be hard pressed to see a single car (have the road to yourself!), much less another cyclist.

2. Because the scenery up here is totally different from down below.
This is ranch country: think horses in fields, flowering jacarandas, eucalyptus trees. Further down the road the landscape changes to lava moonscape.

3. Because the views are unreal from way up here.

4. Because you can start and end your ride at Grandma’s Bakery, where the pastries are homemade and the organic coffee was grown on the slopes of Haleakala.

5. Because you can start and end your ride at Tedeschi Vineyards, Maui’s only winery, housed in a pretty white cottage that I wouldn't mind living in.

So start training.

By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor

Here’s a dirty little confession: Until recently, I was anti-Maui. I’d never been there but I didn’t really want to. The place gets so much love and so much press that it sapped my curiosity.

But Paia, the little plantation town en route to Hana, made me change my mind. Paia is heaven on earth. It’s small, quirky, and bohemian. I’d move there in a heartbeat if anyone would give me a job there. (Anyone?)

So, now that vacation season is upon us, I suggest you go to Paia. Once there, here are the cool things to do:

1. Watch windsurfers strut their stuff—or to strut your own, at Ho’okipa Beach. This is what people come here for.

2. Swim at Baby Beach, which is technically called Paia Bay, in the neighboring town of Spreckelsville. (You can easily walk here from Paia, even barefoot in the sand if you wish.)

A reef close to shore creates a calm, sandy-bottomed pool that’s great for baby and you.

3. Eat breakfast at Cafe des Amis, a warm, artsy little place with a chalkboard menu of Mediterranean and Indian crepes and wraps,  both sweet and savory. My spinach and feta wrap was delish. So was my baby’s chocolate banana crepe (which I ate most of). My baby drank all of my mango smoothie. I didn’t share my latte, because it was to good.

4. Get groceries at Mana Foods. This place had me in a frenzy. I wanted to move to Paia just to shop here. The produce was so prime it was like art. The prepared food was so wholesome and fresh that I bought several pounds of it. And the wall of gourmet chocolate bars—well, you can imagine. Any store with a wall of chocolate deserves a visit.

5. Meet and eat at Flatbread Pizza Company. This is where Paia’s nightlife happens (it’s one of the few places to stay open late), and it also happens to have the best pizza on the island: wood-fired, with all organic ingredients like homemade maple-fennel sausage and organic produce.

Tomorrow: Come back for the one thing you should NOT do in Paia.

by MacKenzie Geidt, Sunset assistant travel editor

Since I clock some serious hours on the Caltrain Baby Bullet every day on my commute to work, I’ve gotta be honest when I say that the prospect of spending a full 12-hour day on a train made me nervous (not that they haven't served me well, but trains now have very specific employment associations.  Ride the train for fun?).  Would it end up feeling like a 12-hour commute??  I hesitantly accepted the offer from Trains Unlimited Tours to ride their private rail car trains from Oakland through the San Joaquin Valley down to Bakersfield and back--all in a single day.  What I was NOT expecting was the glamour, the relaxation, the scenery, the food, and nary an unpleasant commute association. The result? A striking epiphany--WHY in the world would you hit the road (and pay $4/gallon for gas!) or spend hours stranded on an airport tarmac, when you can hit the rails?!   Let's just say that I fell in love with trains all over again (okay, actually for the first time, but you know what I mean).

Check out my ride...all aboard the Silver Lariat! 

These beauties are former California Zephyr cars from the 1940s that had been abandoned (except by rogue rail-yard squatters).  Private owners bought them and painstakingly restored them to their original glory (murals, sleeper cars, glass-domed ceilings, fine china and all!).  The cars latch on to various Amtrak routes and you get the benefit on being on an Amtrak schedule, but with a LOT more style. 

If I could get breakfast like this on Caltrain every day, I'd have a whole new outlook on life:                     

On such a gorgeous trip, you've got to kick back and soak up the scenery (normally on my commuter train I've got my nose in a book so I don't look out the windows...what am I missing?).  What a reminder that so much of California is agricultural...check out the bounty from the window: (and how often can you use the word "bounty" and actually mean it?) Note: prepare for abominable photography skills...

Here's what dinner on the train looks like: (it's amazing that 3 impressive meals + pre-dinner appetizers were all created in the Lariat's galley kitchen--no bigger than my closet)

(We're about to eat pork chops, garlic mashed potatoes, and sugar snap peas....followed by apple cobbler, more white wine, and a sunset made even more beautiful with such a spread in front of us...)

I really can't remember when I've been more relaxed.  Now I've decided I want to see more of the West by train (and I definitely want to experience the sleeper cars....)  Maybe I'll ride the Silver Lariat to Santa Fe...or to Vancouver...or the Southern California Coast....or through the Rocky Mountains to Denver....I'd ride this train anywhere and everywhere it goes.  This is definitely a case where the journey is worth just as much as the destination.

To find out where the Silver Lariat is headed next, contact Trains Unlimited Tours: 800-359-4870.  You might see me aboard.

by Matthew Jaffe, senior writer, Sunset

With all of the focus on this year’s Earth Day, my thoughts keep returning to the best place I know of to experience our world as a living planet.

When you visit Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, geology ceases to be a study focused on the remote past and instead takes on a right-this-second immediacy. That’s especially true these days as lava flows are again reaching the ocean to create the newest land on Earth. And last month, the summit of Kilauea experienced its first explosive eruption since 1924.

My wife Becky and I try to get to the Big Island every year and spend at least a couple days up at the volcano. A few years back, we hiked across the jagged lava field at the end of Chain of Craters Road to flows and hotspots near the ocean’s edge. The smell of burning wood from forest fires touched off by lava at higher elevations drifted through the air and steam rose high into the sky as the lava met the surf. Primal stuff.

When we visited last fall, the action had shifted and lava was flowing near the park from the vent at Pu’u ‘O’o. The area was too remote to reach and so we instead hiked some of our favorite trails, including the four-mile loop at Kilauea Iki Crater and a half-day loop trek to Halema’uma’u Crater that started from Devastation Trail. We could have practically driven to the edge of the crater, the dwelling place of the volcano deity Pele. But the six-mile walk across the caldera’s moonscape took on the meditative quality of a pilgrimage.

While much of the park is covered with barren expanses of lava, other areas are cloaked with cloud forests of ‘ohi’a and fern.  Emerging from these lush jungles and onto the blackness of Kilauea Caldera or Kilauea Iki is like traveling from rainforest to desert in an instant. The only greenery in the calderas is the occasional pioneering plant that has found a bit of soil in the rock’s fissures.

We’re looking forward to getting back this year and hope to catch some of the action. While there have been some eruption-related closures of roads and trails (and even a brief shutdown of the park for a couple days) boat trips are now taking visitors to areas where the lava meets the ocean. And there’s no better time to experience this place than when it is most alive.

By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

What happens in Vegas pays in Vegas.
    Savvy Vegas visitors have long known that when the thermometer rises the room rates drop. A strip suite that runs $350 in January may go for less than half that in July. The catch is that you’re IN LAS VEGAS IN JULY when daytime highs soar into the triple digits. You feel like you’re vacationing on Mercury.   
    But this year is different. This year,Las Vegas hotels are offering hefty summer-time discounts in spring.  For example, the Excalibur offers a two-night package starting at $219, round-trip airfare included. (Packages from other Mirage resorts, like the Bellagio, are also available; visit  www.mgmmirage.com.) Other discounts are even steeper:  the Imperial Palace is offering  $50 a night rooms. Book online to find the best bargains. Check the websites of the hotels you’re interested in, and also hit www.visitlasvegas.com—it’s a good clearing house for last-minute bargains.