Your ultimate guide to Russian River this summer
State of play: The Russian River is a scenic getaway and winds through towering Redwoods and rolling hills, with many great beaches perfect for cooling off.
Guerneville is the hub, with charming restaurants, rustic log cabins and LGBTQ+ friendly vibes.
The latest: Here's how to make the most of your time there during your next visit.
Best river spots
Many of the best beaches are within a 20-minute drive from Guerneville, are dog-friendly and have low parking fees. Here are some favorites.
🛶 Johnson's Beach: One of the most popular known for sunbathing, swimming and paddling.
🛟 Steelhead Beach: Great starting point for the 2-mile tubing trip toward Sunset Beach.
🏝️ Monte Rio Beach: A favorite among locals.
🌊 : Known as "Mom's Beach," its shallow waters make it ideal for families with kids.
🌅 Sunset Beach: Quiet and surrounded by trees — great for a late-afternoon swim.
🗺️ Plus: To find hidden access points, switch to satellite mode and look for gravel banks, sandbars, or informal trails leading to the river.
Zoom in around river bends near Guerneville, Monte Rio, Forestville and the Hacienda Bridge.
Pro tip: Remember to leave no trace, use dry bags to keep valuables safe, and download offline maps or drop a pin — cell service can be spotty.
Where to rent supplies
Summer activities like kayaking, canoeing or tubing require gear. These shops can help:
Burke's Canoe Trips: 8600 River Road, Forestville
King's Sport & Tackle: 16258 Main St., Guerneville
Where to eat and drink:
🍺 Stumptown Brewery: Dog-friendly, laid-back eatery with BBQ and local brews.
🌮 Guerneville Taco Truck: This beloved fixture is a must-stop if you need a quick bite on the go.
🌈 Rainbow Cattle Company: As quirky as its name sounds, this friendly gay bar is a great place to unwind after being out in the sun all day.
🍔 Rio Nido Roadhouse: A true gem serving American fare. Offers pool access, live music and recreational activities.
Where to stay in Guerneville
🛎️ The Stavrand: Upscale boutique hotel with luxurious amenities.
⛺ Johnson's Beach Cabins and Campground: Low-cost option for a more affordable stay.
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Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
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My faith in the American road trip was saved by a small town in Texas on the Fourth of July. When that faith began to waver, and how far the road trip sank on my leaderboard of American pastimes — well, that's harder to say. Below putt-putt golf, perhaps, and south of riverboat gambling. The highway had taken on an elegiac torpor, and a line by the poet Louis Simpson filled my head: '[T]he Open Road goes to the used-car lot.' That's a grim mantra, particularly if you take — or occasionally teach — the American road trip. I'm afraid I do both. In a syllabus I've peddled, mostly proudly, for a decade, I offer the road as a mobile entrée to generational angst (Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road') and racial hierarchies (Colson Whitehead's 'The Underground Railroad'). I introduce dads in search of salvation (Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road') and young women escaping abuse ('Thelma & Louise'). This transcontinental whirlwind of texts implies that road trips are uniquely qualified to capture an enormous, beautiful and flawed country. That wanderlust is a defining facet of the American psyche. That we'll find ourselves just over that hill. For years I believed this. I could opine on the Interstate Highway System and the drive-thru window. I ascribed meaning to the car that NASA left on the moon. My course, just one of many on the topic, gave my musings purpose, and joy. But when my family and I drove from Oregon to Indiana in 2023, I had doubts. The West burned in our rearview, and our Camry's combustive hum felt like another agent of ecological despair. We rolled up the windows and maxed out the AC until our sedan became a portable living room that mostly succeeded in keeping the world at bay. Here were our snacks, and there were our pillows. Each passenger could pacify themselves with a screen. This is where the road trip fails us — or we fail it. Ready access to digital detachments (and directions) have brought sameness to an experience that should be built on surprise. A good road trip is a series of discrete episodes (I did this, I did that) held together by the flimsiest of threads: I did them by car. Planning (and plot) are beside the point, as anyone who's read 'On the Road' knows — though that didn't stop my wife and me from planning our cross-country trek. We visited the Mojave (lunar-like and Looney Tunes) and the Grand Canyon (OK, it's breathtaking). We spied Jesse Pinkman's house in Albuquerque and ate fudge from — forgive me — Uranus, Mo. I loved alternating between the sublime and the profane. I loved the fudge too. But this felt more like sightseeing than road-tripping, a notion that returned whenever I returned to the car. Sameness haunted that interior, but sameness stalked us down the highway too. This is an old complaint, mind you — old as Howard Johnson's, old as Humbert Humbert — but corporate lodgings and chain restaurants do flatten the road trip. My reading, though, had taught me that people (not place) define a road trip. The Easy Riders and the Cheryl Strayeds. The Misfits or the Brad Pitts bouncing shirtless on a bed. And that the people of the road change constantly, stretching one's fixed idea of these United States. Unfortunately, this is where the worst of my road dread began: the American demos itself. There's no way to say this that doesn't sound cynical or misanthropic, but I was over meeting the American people. Despite the possibility of their unacknowledged insights. With little hope that they were stockpiling some nuance lost to the polls. I'd date this disillusionment to Nov. 3, 2016, and simply note that I'm sorry. Let me tell you then about Shamrock, Texas — or really the Shamrock Country Inn in Shamrock, Texas — where my bottomed-out belief in the road was restored. At least temporarily. The inn is just east of a famous art deco filling station that looks like a nail stuck in the ground. Shamrock sits at a symbolic crossroads where two border-to-border highways converge. (U.S. Route 83 and our route: I-40.) And everything from the vape shop to the towing-agency-cum-pizza-parlor bore the name of Historic Route 66. This all lent our evening in the town a whiff of kismet, of cosmic truth. A South Asian family lived on site and owned the motel; they were the warmest hosts we'd known all trip. A middle-aged woman led us to our room, one hand finding my wife's shoulder as she unlocked the door. A man, the woman's husband presumably, watered new flowers ringing the inn's sign. They asked about our travels and noted the forecast, doing so with an air of protection that felt ancient, as if 'shelter' meant more than clean sheets and cable TV. As we talked, the sunset gathered strength in the west. I'm a poet and thus programmed to find meaning in the unlikeliest of places. But that evening, it arrived easy as fireflies. I could hold its small light in my hand. Take the inn's name, the town's too, which is more than a token of luck, or an emoji. It's a reminder of earlier immigrants who, following persecution, folded themselves into the U.S. I thought of the Irish as I looked at the motel's walls: white atop red, blue doors with a star, newly painted to evoke the Texas state flag. I thought of assimilation and acceptance. I wondered if my hosts had sought — and perhaps found — either, or both. I wondered if whiteness, a trait that had aided the Irish, would stand in their way. 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National Geographic
3 hours ago
- National Geographic
The story behind pavlova, the dessert that sparked an international rivalry
This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK). Sweet as it tastes, this much-loved dessert has a bitter history. As is the case with both hummus and hamburgers, the pavlova's birthplace is hotly disputed, with Australia and New Zealand each claiming credit for the idea of crowning towers of billowing meringue with clouds of snowy cream and tumbling fruit. Regular shots are fired back and forth across the Tasman Sea, most recently when a Kiwi energy company 'declared war' by installing an advert at Auckland Airport baggage reclaim stating: 'Home is where the pavlova was really created'. Reactions on the other side of 'the ditch' were outraged: 'Nice of them to promote tourism to Australia' was one online comment. The feud goes all the way to the top, as then Kiwi prime minister Jacinda Ardern discovered when she arrived in Melbourne to find a DIY pavlova kit in her hotel room — prompting her partner to question whether this represented a 'sense of humour or diplomatic incident'. King Charles must have been unaware of the simmering controversy when he boldly praised Sydney's 'world famous cuisine … whether it's smashed avo, a pav or a cab sav' in a speech at the city's Parramatta Park last year. Yet, in truth, the pavlova's precise origins are shrouded in mystery. It was almost certainly named for the great prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, from St Petersburg — probably to celebrate her hugely successful 1926 tour of Australia and New Zealand. 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And while many trace meringue's origins to 18th-century Switzerland, in Clarkson's blog, the Old Foodie, she dates the first recorded recipe to the 1604 collection of a Lady Elinor Fettiplace. The pavlova's precise origins are shrouded in mystery. Photograph by Hannah Hughes Annabelle Utrecht, a Queensland-based writer, has devoted the past decade to digging into the history of the pavlova, prompted by an online argument with a Kiwi acquaintance. In the course of their research, the pair discovered that by the 18th century, 'large meringue constructions incorporating cream and fruit elements could be found in aristocratic kitchens across German-speaking lands, so the thing we call a pavlova today is actually more than two centuries old'. Naturally, everyone wanted a slice of this noble pie, and recipes began to appear: the vacherin, a meringue bowl filled with whipped cream or ice cream, fruit and syrup-infused sponge cake, often credited to the 19th-century French chef Marie-Antoine Carême; the baked alaska; the German schaum ('foam') torte. Even English writer Mrs Beeton includes a meringue gateau, filled with macerated strawberries and whipped cream, in her 1861 recipe collection. It therefore seems likely that the pavlova probably arrived in both New Zealand and Australia with European immigrants long before Pavlova herself. Of course, few dishes spring fully formed from nowhere, but when did the idea of a meringue topped with cream and fruit begin to be known as a 'pavlova' — or a 'pav', if you speak Antipodean? The earliest mention of something resembling the modern pavlova labelled as such can be found in the 1929 New Zealand Dairy Exporter Annual, contributed by a reader, although this version seems to have been layered more like a French dacquoise. The next-earliest, from the Rangiora Mothers' Union Cookery Book of Tried and Tested Recipes, of 1933, is also Kiwi. Australia's first claim to the dish dates from 1935, when Herbert 'Bert' Sachse, the chef at Perth's Esplanade Hotel, was asked to come up with something new for the afternoon tea menu. Manager Harry Nairn apparently remarked that his creation was 'as light as Pavlova', and the legend was born. However, one of Sachse's descendants contacted Helen Leach, a culinary anthropologist at the University of Otago, to suggest their ancestor may have confused the dates, given Pavlova's death in 1931. And in a 1973 interview, Sachse himself explained his creation was an adaptation of a recipe from Australian Woman's Mirror magazine, submitted by a New Zealand resident. When questioned by Australian newspaper The Beverley Times, the 'silver-haired great grandfather' mused that he'd 'always regretted that the meringue cake was invariably too hard and crusty, so I set out to create something that would have a crunchy top and would cut like a marshmallow'. This, according to Utrecht's Kiwi research partner Dr Andrew Paul Wood, makes Western Australia-born Sachse unusual among his countrymen: 'I think the Australian meringue is crunchier … the New Zealand one is more marshmallowy inside,' Wood told The Sydney Morning Herald's Good Food guide. In her 2024 book Sift, British pastry chef and cookery book author Nicola Lamb writes that adding cornflour to the meringue base, as both Sachse and the New Zealand Dairy Exporter Annual reader suggest, 'helps promote [this] marshmallowy, thick texture'. For maximum squishiness, however, Lamb recommends shaping the mixture into a tall crown, 'as it's more difficult for the heat to penetrate the thick meringue walls'; if you prefer crunchy all the way through, go for a shallow bowl shape. Whatever texture you choose, once the meringue has cooled completely it's generally filled with whipped cream — usually unsweetened, given the sugar in the meringue, although it may be flavoured with vanilla — and then your choice of fruit. Australian cultural historian Dr Carmel Cedro agrees with Wood that not only do the two countries disagree over the correct texture for a pavlova, but on appropriate toppings. 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Inspired by the architecture of the building itself, it features white meringue sails atop perfect spikes of whipped cream and Italian meringue filled with passion fruit curd. When it comes to pavlova, it seems, there's one for every taste. Although the caviar and cranberry number recently dreamed up by a firm of Polish fish farmers might prove the one pav neither Australia nor New Zealand wants to claim as their own. The pavlova's birthplace is hotly disputed, with Australia and New Zealand each claiming credit for the idea of crowning towers of billowing meringue with clouds of snowy cream and tumbling fruit. Photograph by Hannah Hughes Where to eat pavlova in Australia and New Zealand Cibo, Auckland Hidden away in a former chocolate factory in Parnell, Cibo has been described as one of Auckland's best-kept secrets, although it's still won numerous awards over the past three decades. There are usually at least two pavlovas on offer: a fruit version (classic strawberry and kiwi, for example) and one with salted caramel, peanut and chocolate dust. Floriditas, Wellington When The Sydney Morning Herald praises a New Zealand pavlova, the dessert has to be doing something right — although this much-loved bistro doesn't make things easy for itself. Instead of the classic recipe using white caster sugar, Floriditas opts for brown sugar, which is damper and more temperamental, but which gives the meringue base a deeper, richer flavour. Fruit varies with the seasons, from strawberries in summer to tamarillos in autumn. Ester, Sydney Forget hovering anxiously in front of the oven to ensure your snowy meringue doesn't take on even the merest hint of tan — at this Sydney neighbourhood joint (which comes highly recommended by Nigella Lawson) they char them in a wood-fired oven at a toasty 600C. That's a full 500C hotter than most recipes recommend, giving them the distinct look of a marshmallow toasted over a campfire. The accompaniments vary; they might be nectarine and yoghurt or passion fruit and elderflower, for example. Snow White Bakery, Melbourne Overwhelming local enthusiasm for this tiny bakery's classic pavlova — an unapologetically traditional tower of meringue, cream and icing-sugar-dusted berries — may be less of a news story than baker Tegan's Vegemite-infused take on the beloved Australian lamington (a cake), but it's probably more of a crowd-pleaser. For maximum squishiness, pastry chef and cookery book author Nicola Lamb recommends shaping the mixture into a tall crown; if you prefer crunchy all the way through, go for a shallow bowl shape. Photograph by Hannah Hughes Recipe: Helen Goh's summer berry pavlova To celebrate summer, I've chosen a mix of berries with a touch of passion fruit as a nod to the dessert's Antipodean roots — but feel free to use any in-season fruit. Serves: 8-10 Takes: 2 hrs 5 mins plus cooling Ingredients For the meringue250g egg whites (6-8 eggs, depending on size)½ tsp cream of tartar400g caster sugar2 tsp vanilla extract1 tsp white vinegar2 tsp cornflour pinch of salt
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
US teen Ethan Guo detained in Antarctica while venturing on solo flight to 7 continents to raise money for childhood cancer research
Bumpy landing. An American teen is accused of going off course and landing in Antarctica without permission as he attempts to become the youngest pilot to fly to all seven continents. Ethan Guo, a 19-year-old aviator from Memphis, was detained and charged with submitting a false flight plan before traversing towards the South Pole on June 28, the Magallanes and Chilean Antarctic Prosecutor's Office. 7 Ethan Guo behind the controls of the Cessna 182Q he's been flying around the world since May 2024. @ Guo is aiming to raise $1 million for cancer research with his high-flying campaign across the globe. Guo, the only person aboard the Cessna 182Q, took off from Carlos Ibáñez del Campo Airport in Punta Arenas, Chile, with plans to fly over the southern Chile port city but diverted course and headed to Antarctica. 'The accused provided false information to the aeronautical authority. He submitted a flight plan indicating that he was going to fly over the city of Punta Arenas,' Regional Prosecutor Cristian Crisosto Rifo said in a video to X. 'However, he continued on his way to Antarctica without any information or authorization, landing at the Lieutenant Rodolfo Marsh Base in Chilean Antarctic territory,' Rifo said. The base is located on King George Island in the South Shetland Islands off the coast of mainland Antarctica in the Southern Ocean. 7 Guo lands his plane at Lieutenant Rodolfo Marsh Base in Chilean Antarctic territory on King George Island on June 28, 2025. Reuters 7 Guo is aiming to raise $1 million for cancer research with his high-flying campaign across the globe. @ Guo's unannounced arrival was considered a danger to the airspace around Antarctica and the Magallanes region. The Asian-American teen was apprehended after his landing and charged by authorities at the research base. 'The accused not only violated the Aeronautical Code but also multiple national and international regulations regarding routes to Antarctica and access to the white continent,' Rifo added. Rifo applauded the Chilean Navy for its 'impeccable work' taking in the teen and protecting the Antarctic region. Guo's attorney Karina Ulloa claims the teen began experiencing complications while flying and ended up in Antarctica. 'While already in the air, he began to experience a series of complications,' Ulloa told CNN, 'He was conducting an exploratory flight to see if he could follow this route or not.' The teen is being held on the Antarctic island until he is permitted to return to Chile on a commercial flight back to Punta Arenas, CNN Español reported. Weather conditions have prohibited flights from taking off and landing on the island. Once back in South America, Guo faces a 90-day investigation and will be forced to remain in Chile throughout the period. 7 Weather conditions have prohibited flights from taking off and landing on the island. @ 7 Once back in South America, Guo faces a 90-day investigation and will be forced to remain in Chile throughout the period. @ Guo has documented his year-long journey on his Instagram account, where he has enlisted more than 1 million people to 'follow my solo flight around the world to fight cancer.' He last posted an update on his travels on June 23, which marked Day 142 of his trip as he flew around the Philippines. He first took off from his hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, in May 2024, and has landed in nearly 60 countries. 7 Guo has documented his year-long journey on his Instagram account, where he has enlisted more than 1 million people to 'follow my solo flight around the world to fight cancer.' @ 7 He first took off from his hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, in May 2024, and has landed in nearly 60 countries. @ Guo was inspired by his cousin's battle with stage 4 Hodgkin's lymphoma. He set out to raise $1 million for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, according to his website, which hasn't been updated in recent weeks. 'I admire him,' Guo said of his cousin. 'He inspired me to take life more seriously and join the fight against cancer. I want to use every opportunity to raise awareness of childhood cancer and the necessity to increase research efforts to find prevention and treatment methods.'
