I need a town in California

Santa Barbara.
Small town feel. Very laid back. Not far from the hills where there is plenty of hiking to be had.

Half Moon Bay- very cool place

San Luis Obispo or Carpinteria would work too. Or Morro Bay or Cambria if you want to go really small.

Carmel, Pacific Grove, Aptos, Monteray... All lousy places if you hate redwoods, crashing surf and the sound of sea lions.

I concur with the other responders to your question. Pacific Grove is an incredibly charming and beautiful place. Monterey is funky but a little touristy. Carmel is a little bit more ritzy, the kind of place where your characters' parents might want to visit.

Big Sur is uniquely exquisite, but I'm not sure how many people actually live there.

Atascadero is also very doable as a hometown. Pay it Forward was one of my favorite novels, but the author got Atascadero all wrong. I was expecting a gray concrete dump, and instead fell in love with the city when I visited last year.

http://www.atascadero.org/

Santa Barbara is too big and touristy these days, I'm afraid.
In addition to the other suggestions, I'd put Lompoc. On a peninsula, very isolated, very small-town, undistinguished - but near a prison and mountains and farms.

Also, small towns are very different depending on the stretch of coast - southern, central, or northern. I don't know much about northern towns. Central towns are very classic "small town" and kind of isolated from one another, surrounded by some very picturesque scenery; and the southern coast is pretty over-developed from LA to San Diego - sometimes almost a solid block of suburb.

Smiling Ted said:

Santa Barbara is too big and touristy these days, I'm afraid.
In addition to the other suggestions, I'd put Lompoc. On a peninsula, very isolated, very small-town, undistinguished - but near a prison and mountains and farms.

Also, small towns are very different depending on the stretch of coast - southern, central, or northern. I don't know much about northern towns. Central towns are very classic "small town" and kind of isolated from one another, surrounded by some very picturesque scenery; and the southern coast is pretty over-developed from LA to San Diego - sometimes almost a solid block of suburb.

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I was just in Lompoc last week. It was 100 degrees when I left LA, and at 4 pm in Lompoc, I was freezing cold standing out in the sun, and it felt great.

One thing I've noticed about Lompoc , and I'm not sure why this stands out in my mind - I've seen moms and grandmothers let their babies and toddlers crawl on the sidewalk next to an outdoor play area without freaking out about germs. In L.A., that same mother would have a package of bacterial wipes in her purse, and she'd freak out if her kid's hands touched the sidewalk.

Half Moon Bay is close to San Francisco.

Avalon, on Catalina Island, is about the same distance from San Diego as from Los Angeles.

How about Oxnard?

Suburban areas:

Temecula (semi-desertic in the summer)
Carlsbad (on the ocean front, near LegoLand)
Salinas (near Monterey Bay, farming area)
Santa Rosa (in the Napa valleys)
San Raphael / Sausalito / Tiburon (very metro-like, but just outside San Fran).

-cb

Having been stationed in Monterey, (the Presidio was a tough, tough assignment, let me tell you), I think the whole Monterey/Santa Cruz area would work well . . . close enough to bigger cities to make easy trips in on the weekend, far enough away to avoid most of the probs.

Course, you could always do what I'm doing and invent a "coastal town" and add in what parts of these towns you want to use with your own points of interest, etc.

Del Mar is nice, in San Diego County, but mostly expensive.

I grew up in Yorba Linda, CA, which is in Orange County, the north-eastern-most corner, and I love it. Small city, still zoned for horses, and very safe. Mostly upper-middle class, but there is a variety.

Pretty much anywhere in OC is a good town to grow up in. Safe, better air quality than LA, and still with access to beaches, mountains, and deserts in 2 hours or less.

Lompoc is flowers, they grow flower seed there, also Vandenberg Air Force Base, where they test rockets. There's a historic mission as well as the prison. It is small, has a small town feel. And, where I go when I visit the town, Jalama Beach Park, 23 miles through winding mountain, scenic road through farm and ranch land and oak trees. A great beach for surfers, for camping, for walking/hiking, beachcombing, shells and agates, and in the little store, Jalama Burgers! Some people drive the twisty road just for the burgers. The only competition is a place on Santa Claus Lane in Carpenteria, which also has a nice beach and is small, near Santa Barbara. Nurseries, avocados, big clams on the beach. And speaking of clams, Pismo Beach. La Jolla is too rich, too close to San Diego, Carmel also is wealth and attached to Monterey, which may be a larger town than you want. I will stop chamber of commercing now. Good luck.

Just moved to Fallbrook, and it's really nice here. About 30 miles from the coast. 50 miles to San Diego. The town you pick will depend a lot on how rich (or not) your character is. Most of the coastal communities (Carmel, Monterey, ect) are quite expensive.

Hey, I lived in Pacific Grove and Monterey on an enlisted man's salary.

Sure, my apartment was small, but it's doable.

It would definitely help to know a bit about the characters social status/family history. Did he grow up near truck farms? Fishing industries? What did his parents do? Wealthy, Middle Class, Dirt Poor? Contemporary or Period story? Many of the communities changed A LOT in the sixties.

Half Moon Bay is about forty miles south of San Francisco on 1 - Pescadero is another twenty miles south - MUCH smaller, almost nothing but a bit of farming and some retail. Very rural - close to Butano Park - great hiking, coastal trails, lovely place. Just a skipping stone away from scenic Pigeon Point Lighthouse too - which makes a GREAT setting.

Mendocino on the northern coast.

The town itself sits perched on the edge of the Pacific and looks straight out of New England.
The outdoor scenes from the TV show Murder, She Wrote -supposedly Cabot Cove, Maine- were filmed in Mendocino.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendocino,_California

Well, Grandparents (Great granparents?) might have come out of Oklahoma during the dustbowl - migrating farmers - sure, lots wound up in California. SO you could work that angle.

Really most of the smaller towns mentioned - Like Mendocino, Half Moon Bay, Monterey, San Luis Obisbo - along the coast - you've got the truck farm industries - and fishing as well. Most of them are 'close enough' to a major city that he could have spent time in them, maybe some schooling.

~*Kate*~ said:

Oh man, I just looked at the link to Mendocino's Wiki and realized that I remember Ft. Bragg-- my favorite stop on our trip up 101 was at a state park right outside of Ft. Bragg. I found it! McKerricher State Park. *sigh* Yeah, Mendocino might have to be it. Maybe I can talk the DH into a research trip....

ETA: WriteKnight, good point about the Dust Bowl. That makes total sense-- gracias.

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When I lived in Nevada, my favorite and frequent road trips were always to Little River outside of Mendocino.

It's my most favorite place in the whole world!

Did you ever make it to Glass Beach outside of Ft. Bragg?
Years ago the town's dump trucks would just back up to the Pacific, and unload the trash directly into the ocean.
Years of shifting tides and crashing waves turned the pieces of broken bottles into smooth, polished glass nuggets of every color.

http://images.google.com/images?q=g...&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4