Originally Posted by
so3003
Thank you for the updates
- particularly appreciate the head's up about potential public holiday weekends!
To clarify things we have previously enjoyed:
- scenic driving, eg Big Sur (California), Great Ocean Road (Australia)
- good art galleries eg MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London)
- aviation related attractions eg Canadian Air and Space Museum (Toronto), Museum of Flight (Edinburgh)
- historical buildings eg Casa Loma (Toronto), Hearst Castle (California)
- self-touring (ie not organised tours) cities like Boston / New York / San Francisco
- other generic places of interest (Nantucket / Kangaroo Island / Cape Cod....)
Additional suggestions welcomed
From reading this post Im guessing you did san francisco and part of the coast before.
Have you done La , San Diego, Las vegas before?
What about Portland or Seattle? You could easily fly up to those cities easily as a separate booking from LAX.
In LA--the California Science Center now has one of the Space Shuttles on display.
In the Seattle area you have a few air/space stuff you could see. there is a the Boeing Museum of flight which has planes as well as the training module from the space shuttle that was something the astronauts would train their missions in that was a lifesize replica to the space shuttle interior. Just north of Seattle there is one of many Boeing manufacturing plants. This one does tours for visitors.
Outside of Portland they have the Evergreen Air and space Museum.
There isnt much historic buildings out west. the most historic are the spanish missions. Just north of Santa Barbara in the Santa Ynez Valley near solvang is the old mission Santa Ines. In this area there are wineries made famous by the movie Sideways.
LA and San Diego have tour stuff available. In La the tours are going to be dominated by tour of where the stars live
Another option for short travel from LAX would be albuquerque and Santa Fe where you could do a short flight to and spend about 5 days or so in the area. Santa Fe has alot of older history. You could drive but its about a ~10 hr drive to LAX. If you were to drive I would suggest staying south through Tuscon and Phoenix where its nice still. You can explore a few national parks and monuments on your drive. From I-40 and north it can be colder at that time of year. November is a volatile time with potential temps in this area where it could be in the upper 40s for highs or near 70.