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Sometimes, a girl’s gotta get out of L.A. And we girls and boys that live here are lucky that we live in a state where a variety of fun and interesting places are only a short drive away, making a weekend getaway incredibly easy.

Now I was born and raised on the Central Coast, so I am shamelessly biased when I say that trip up to the middle of the state, winding my way through the second-tier wine country, is my favorite way to escape. In a few days you can easily taste your way through a barrelful of wine and stop in such a variety of places that you may feel like you just took a full-fledged vacation.

There is a plethora of options for a trip up the coast, but this is a blog post, not a book so I’m going to highlight just three stops as visited by me on a recent trip up north for my littlest (and only) brother’s wedding: Los Olivos, San Luis Obispo, and Paso Robles.

Los Olivos: If your driving up the 101 from Los Angeles, all Central Coast natives know that you simply have to get off the 101 in Santa Barbara and take Highway 154 over the San Marcos Pass until it meets back up with the 101. Not only is it 12 miles shorter, but you’ll see some amazing scenery, have a much more interesting drive, and you will get to stop at Los Olivos. Highway 154 winds its way through mountains and past a lake in a way that is often beautiful and sometimes a little frightening, and just before it meets back up with the 101, there’s a storybook town called Los Olivos. You won’t see it from the road, but when you get there you’ll find a quiet town with a flagpole smack in the middle and every other storefront is a tasting room for a different winery.

Los Olivos is always my pit stop on my drive up. It has an overwhelming peacefulness and it has Panino. Right near the flagpole, Panino is a little sandwich shop that seems to have every combination of sandwich topping you might possibly want, with vegetarian options helpfully grouped together on their neatly chalked menu. There are salads and soup as well, plus chips and the biggest cookies I have seen in my life.

I almost always order the same thing: prosciutto, mozzarella, red peppers, basil, and tapenade on focaccia. You might as well call this the KT, because this sandwich was made exactly for me. If I am being good, I will get their brown bag special which comes with only a half sandwich, plus a salad. I choose their harvest salad, which contains the pleasantly different ingredient combination of nuts and dried apricots along with goat cheese crumbles.

You sit out on the patio and eat surrounded by the smell of honey and grapes with only the pleasant murmer of fellow travelers to break the calm. It’s a great way to gain strength for the next part of your journey.

Other Los Olivos destinations include: the market/deli about two blocks back toward the highway from Panino. On sunny weekend days they pull out the barbecue and cook up tri-tip sandwiches that you can have with BBQ sauce or salsa (I choose salsa). This is what the Central Coast is all about and you must try it sometime during your visit. Unless you are a vegetarian. There is also a store called Global Gardens that specializes in artisan olive oils and vinegars along with other gourmet food items and gadgets. They have a tasting bar where they’ll let you sample a multitude of olive oils and vinegars and teach you about each one.

San Luis Obispo: San Luis Obispo is the next stop on my mini-tour. There’s a little bit of everything here and it’s a good place to spend a night. If you want to be amazed by something completely crazy, choose one of the many themed rooms at the Madonna Inn. If you would rather have a tranquil stay, try The Sanitarium, a place of health and restoration since the 1880s, it re-opened in 2005 as a 7 room bed and breakfast and spa.

After a good night’s sleep, I recommend a big breakfast to prepare you for whatever you plan to do during the day.

Big Sky Cafe has had the best breakfast in town for years on end, and has been doing organic, seasonal, local-produced since well before it was trendy. It can be crowded on weekends, but for an L.A. native the wait will seem negligible compared to the many minutes we’ve spent lolling on the sidewalk outside the mainstay L.A. brunch spots.

The menu mainly consists of egg dishes, but if you ‘re in the mood for something different, and are starving (maybe you had an action-packed night?) I highly recommend the pozole. This time around, however, I just went for the standard egg breakfast. Two eggs - fried to order; double smoked, thick sliced bacon; fruit salad; and corn bread. Notice that the fruit salad contains a variety of fruits, and is not simply a melon medley. Bonus points for that. $8.50 for the above breakfast, $6.95 without the bacon.

The best day of the week to be in San Luis Obispo is Thursday. Thursday nights, the entire downtown becomes a pedestrian zone for the Farmer’s Market. Along with the farmers you will find a multitude of local products represented. The best dinner in town is some barbecued tri-tip from McClintock’s and then a Cowboy Cookie for dessert. If the crowds overwhelm you, you can slip down Garden Street and hop into Linnaea’s cafe for a coffee or tea out in the back garden.

Paso Robles/Templeton: My final destination is Paso Robles. Paso Robles is hot wine country right now and on a visit here you can taste wines of both large, well-known and small boutique wineries. I prefer the boutique wineries because you can taste and purchase wines that aren’t available in stores, and some of the better wines may only be available to the winery’s club members. For a description of a few of the hundreds of wineries you can visit, check out my post from last year on Paso Robles Wineries.

Paso Robles is interesting because it’s a place in transition. In many ways it’s still a cowboy town and I hope it doesn’t lose that. I may not like country music or country fashion or even country interior decorating, but I LOVE cowboys and cowboy cooking and cowboy fun (even if cowboy music is involved).

Paso Robles is the home of the Mid-State fair where you can see Bob Dylan or Aerosmith on the cheap. But if you’re a local you will know to scope out the hidden gems playing for free on the side stages. Hello, this year you can see Joan Jett, the Bangles, and Chubby Checker all for free! You can also lose your lunch on the carnival rides, eat all the fried food and food on a stick you can stomach, and check out the prize-winning foods and animals in the exhibition hall as well as check out the wine and beer competitions.

As far as food goes, there is McPhee’s, a steakhouse that’s surprisingly modern and innovative, and there’s the new-ish Artisan, which seems like a refugee from further north.

On my most recent trip, I went to Buona Tavola. Buona Tavola serves traditional Northern Italian food and I have been going to the San Luis Obispo location of the restaurant since I was a wee tyke. Nothing here is going to wow you with it’s inventiveness or creativity. It’s just solid (delicious) traditional Italian cooking.

Paso Robles doesn’t have much night life, so the only activity I can recommend for after dark is to find yourself a cowboy bar. We stayed at the Paso Robles Inn, which happily comes with its own cowboy bar, The Cattlemen’s Lounge. The great thing about being in a wine country is that even the cowboy bar has decent wine as their house wine. And there’s cowboy dancing! And this particular bar has a balcony that is particularly nice on a warm evening, especially if you do not desire to do cowboy dancing to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s greatest hits. Just a warning however, my vodka gimlet was all vodka and very little gimlet so might as well go for the good stuff.

If you can handle it after your evening at the cowboy bar, the perfect Saturday morning excursion is to the Templeton farmer’s market. Templeton is only about five minutes away from Paso Robles and the farmer’s market there is excellent. It takes place around the edge of the park and local farmer’s and producers supply everything you could want: fresh produce, meat, fish, cheese and baked goods.

I happened to be at the market when Blenheim apricots were in season, so I had to take advantage of that. Blenheim apricots are members of the Slow Food Movement’s Ark of Taste, which seeks to preserve endangered foods. Due to its late maturation period and especially its fragility, which makes the fruit difficult to transport, Blenheims are in a decline. Which is too bad because they are intense in flavor and in addition to eating raw are wonderful for cooking.

One of my favorite booths was the mushroom booth, where I purchased some dried morels - hard to get in L.A. - and learned how to grow my own mushrooms from the friendly salesperson, who was also selling the growing apparatus.

Other purchases included juicy boysenberries, a gingerbread cookie with an added touch of white pepper, and a bread stick to round out my lunch. The park made a nice atmosphere for the market, as we were surrounded by grass and trees, and children and dogs played in the center of the park, and there was a band that was … interesting, to say the least; kind of like a cross between “Up With People” and Captain and Tenille.

There once was a time when I couldn’t wait to get out of town. After years of hard city living, though, I look forward to a weekend at home, and even when my weekend is packed with activity, I come back refreshed and ready to face the traffic and smog. And the beauty of California is, that our state is so varied  in its landscapes that a trip up the coast is really a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

By KT (see more of her posts). You can find more of KT's writing at her own website Gastronomy 101.