The best free things to do in California
Lonely Planet Editors
15 March 2021
Sprawling California may be that state that gave us the Gold Rush and home to some of the most expensive cities in the United States, but you don t have to blow your vacation budget to visit. Some of the best sites in California are free to experience, from the towering redwoods of NorCal to the surf breaks of SoCal and dozens of wineries, museums, gardens, and cultural touchstones in between.
Whether you re looking for stunning state parks or museums that cover subjects from the avant garde to cryptozoology, Italian grapes or California cuisine, marine wildlife or towering man-made infrastructure, there s a lot to see in the Golden State. We narrowed your list down to the top 32 free attractions in California you don t want to miss, organized from north to south.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021): A bookseller who was a poet who was a publisher who was a writer
Ferlinghetti, who published the legendary Beat poets and founded the iconic City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco died on February 22 at the age of 101. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. | Cmichel67 / CC BY-SA 4.0
Over a decade ago when I was working as a radio host at KALW, a small public radio station in San Francisco, I got an email from a producer. It was a script of an opera. He was wondering if I could read a short sample from it. Lawrence Ferlinghetti had written it. Actually, the producer said “Mr Ferlinghetti is making changes as I type this.” Ferlinghetti was almost 90 at that time. He wanted to tape a session, a rough read, to hear what it was sounding like.
Sam Whiting and Nora Mishanec February 23, 2021Updated: February 25, 2021, 10:24 pm
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his apartment in North Beach in March 2018. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle 2018
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the first poet laureate of San Francisco, was so beloved that on Tuesday, Feb. 23, a day after his death at age 101, Supervisor Aaron Peskin closed the regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors with a four-minute memorial sermon that went uninterrupted.
Peskin touched on the great poet’s internal contradictions as both a Navy man and a pacifist, and his abiding belief that the funkiness of North Beach must be protected, which Ferlinghetti himself did by cranking his red jalopy truck up and down the steep hills and along Columbus Avenue. By the end of his speech, Peskin was visibly emotional.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti obituary msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.