SeeCalifornia.com

This weekend Santa Maria celebrates the locally grown strawberries that you can smell when zooming past the city on I-101 between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The annual Santa Maria Strawberry Festival pays homage to a crop that is actually grown in the city, unlike many California festivals where the foods must be shipped in for big festival events. Santa Maria barbecue is well known throughout the nation, but just take a look at your gourmet lettuce purchased at Costco. Oftentimes it comes from Santa Maria. The same goes for broccoli, beans, berries and wine grapes.

Wine offers one of the biggest draws for tourists visiting the Central Coast and when they arrive they are often met with the most pleasant weather in the world. Not too foggy like the Bay Area and not too hot like San Diego and Southern California, this near-coast city (approx. 8 miles from the Pacific Ocean) gets a special gift — a cool breeze from the the west blowing into the valley.  While there are several really hot days each year, most the time the temperature is shirt sleeves to jacket weather. It’s a secret that locals know about but they don’t advertise. Growing fast enough as it is, Santa Maria has already surpassed Santa Barbara as the most populated city on the Central Coast, exceeding 100,000.