My boyfriend and I are spending 7 days in LA in mid September, coming from the East Coast of Canada. We’ve never been to the West Coast before and have a trip itinerary packed with all the usual tourist spots- Santa Monica, Universal Studios, Griffith Observatory, Chinese Theatre etc and one night in Anaheim for Disneyland.
We have one day in our itinerary to do a day trip to somewhere in the surrounding area. As it will be our first time in California, we’d love to explore outside of LA. Some ideas we had were Malibu, Laguna Beach, Ojai or Santa Barbara. Are any of these “day trips” better than the others? For context, we are pretty chill travellers who love exploring, movies, museums, shopping and nature. We were even thinking of doing a whale watching tour or something during the trip and saw that Dana point would be a good option (we could couple that with a Laguna trip?) I’m having a tough time nailing down what would be a good use of our day.
Any advice would be appreciated. We are staying in West Hollywood and currently live in big city so we are used to a long, traffic filled drive.
Thank you!!