Santa Barbara? Please. Californians Should Spend Summer Vacation in Redding Instead.

In the Northstate, Californians Can Visit Their Beautiful Waterworks, and Mountains with Mystique

If you love California and haven’t figured out where to go for summer vacation, here’s a suggestion: Go north!

You could, for example, go to Redding. Sure, the city of 92,000 at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley probably isn’t high on your list of preferred destinations. But the pleasures are all the more intriguing for being less known.

Redding and its region, the Northstate, are crucial—spectacularly so— to understanding how California really works. The Northstate is at once more tied to the state (with cities and local governments so small …