I’d like to make a suggestion for a summer vacation travel destination where you can find a great deal of variety in the type of local attractions offered. Everybody has different goals for their summer travel. Some of us want to visit Disneyland and some just want to relax on the beach. Others love to see historical sites and still others love to play golf.

An obvious destination is the Disneyland Resort, which includes Downtown Disney and Disney’s California Adventure (by the way, the company is spending like a billion dollars on a major renovation of California Adventure over the next several years).

If you haven’t been to Anaheim in several years, you’ll be amazed at the changes. The addition of Disney’s California Adventure alone has changed the whole atmosphere of the Resort, and with the billion-dollar upgrade now underway this will only continue into the future. If you do any people watching, you will notice a very international mix of visitors at the Resort. It is a great place for people watching—a veritable cultural melting pot.

Speaking of a cultural melting pot, Southern California in general is a concoction of people and cultures from around the world. Although there are often visitors from Europe, Africa and Asia, the countries along the Pacific Ocean are particlularly well represented.

Along with visits to theme parks and the beach, it may be worthwhile to visit some of the permanent ethnic communities spread around Orange and Los Angeles counties in particular. These include Chinatown, Little Tokyo and Koreatown in Los Angeles County. Some of the best-known ethnic communities in Orange County include the Vietnamese community in Little Saigon, and the Hispanic community around Fourth Street in Santa Ana.

Southern California is a pretty well-known vacation destination and there are a great many hotels to be found. Some travelers are on business trips and are looking for mid-price hotels with easy access to the local freeways and airports.

We’re talking mostly about vacation travelers here, and for them you’re looking at a much wider range in quality and price. In either case, here is a good website intended to help you find good hotel deals. The site offers information about places to visit in Southern California and a lot of other useful material, but certainly will help both business and vacation travelers. You can use this website to find package airline and hotel deals also, which is convenient.

Another good site with helpful insight into hotels near major tourist attractions is the SoCal Vacation Guru. It does not specialize only in lodging options but also covers other aspects of a trip to Southern Calfornia, discussing Disneyland, Universal Studios, beaches, etc. The Guru offers wisdom about many areas of vacation planning.

If you are interested to hear what others are thinking about travel in general, you might visit Travel Talk. This has lots of input on a very diverse spectrum of travel-oriented topics. You can find subjects ranging from trips to India to driving trips by yourself to careers in the travel business. So it’s not going to help you much in finding a hotel in southern California, but you might find something useful. Hit the other two sites presented above for SoCal hotel information and insight.