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34 days away

ArtWalk Carlsbad 2026

Sep 19, 2026 Free Armada Drive, Carlsbad, CA 92011

A painting has to compete with the actual Pacific for your attention out here, which is a brutal thing to do to an artist and the exact reason the work on that bluff has to be good. One weekend a year the ground above the Flower Fields becomes a gallery with no walls and no ceiling. Over a hundred and fifty juried artists from both sides of the border set up along the drive — painting, sculpture, glass, jewelry, photography, ceramics — and every piece is sold directly by the person who made it, so you get the story along with the object. This is not a craft fair. The jury is real. KidsWalk runs alongside it with stations where children paint and build and sculpt without a screen anywhere in sight. Musicians rotate through both days. Food trucks hold the perimeter. Walking in costs nothing. Whether you hold strong opinions about brushwork or you just like looking at beautiful things in a beautiful place, it is the same weekend for both of you.

Pechanga Tacos & Tequila Festival 2026 (5th Annual)

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34 days away

133

Pechanga Tacos & Tequila Festival 2026 (5th Annual)

Sep 19, 2026 Ticketed — see pechanga.com 45000 Pechanga Pkwy, Temecula, CA …

The tell that a taco festival is real is the sound of a tortilla press working nonstop — masa hitting the comal, fresh rounds coming off faster than the line can eat them. That is the register this one runs at. Local and regional vendors competing on fillings and housemade salsas, tortillas pressed on-site all afternoon, and most of the valley turning out because they already know. Local chefs go head to head in a cook-off you get to vote on, the main stage runs music all day, and the tequila and mezcal side keeps pace with curated tastings and margarita competitions. The proceeds stay home and fund Temecula Valley charities, which is a large part of why the community shows up in force year after year rather than once. Pechanga Resort Casino, 45000 Pechanga Parkway, Temecula. September 19, 2026, about ten minutes off the I-15, parking on-site. It sells out — advance tickets at pechanga.com. Come hungry and come early. The best fillings are gone before the crowd thins.

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34 days away

Capital of Craft Beer Fest

Sep 19, 2026 Broadway Pier, 1000 N Harbor Dr, S…

Nobody stumbled into making this one of the great beer cities on earth. A whole generation of brewers argued and experimented and out-hopped each other into it, and the people who drink here wear that history like a hometown jersey. This is that scene's yearly reunion. Sixty-plus beers poured on the pier with the bay sitting right there, unlimited tasters, a commemorative cup, and local bands instead of a hired DJ. It is the kind of afternoon where you fall into conversation with the brewer who actually made the thing in your glass, because in this town they show up and pour it themselves. The early VIP hour is the insider move, before the general crowd floods in. 21+. Broadway Pier, 1000 N Harbor Dr. September 19. The faithful here treat Capital of Craft as a point of civic pride. This is the day they get to prove it.

Great Taste of Europa Wine & Food Festival

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34 days away

Great Taste of Europa Wine & Food Festival

Sep 19, 2026 $85+ Europa Village, 33475 La Serena Wa…

Europa Village is the Temecula Valley's love letter to old-world Europe, a sprawling wine estate built to feel like a village plucked from Spain, Italy, and France, and its Great Taste of Europa festival turns the whole place into a roaming feast. Wander from courtyard to courtyard sampling wines, small plates, and live music, all under the September sun with the vineyards rolling out around you. Saturday, September 19, 2026, at Europa Village in Temecula. Come hungry and thirsty, pace yourself across the tastings, and make an afternoon of one of the prettiest wineries in the valley. Come hungry and leave quietly planning the actual trip to Italy. This is a genuine little escape happening right in your backyard, no passport or long drive required. Come eat, drink, and pretend you're in Tuscany for an afternoon.

Weekly

34 days away

Big Bear Lake Oktoberfest 2026

Every Saturday · Next Sep 19 Big Bear Lake Convention Center, 4…

Up at 6,750 feet the beer comes with a mountain view and absolutely no chill whatsoever. Big Bear's Oktoberfest has been running for over fifty years, which means the whole thing operates like a well-oiled Bavarian machine: the log-sawing contests, the stein-holding endurance battles, oompah bands flown in from actual Germany, and a hall full of flatlanders discovering that yes, they will in fact do the chicken dance in front of three hundred strangers. It runs weekend after weekend all through the fall, so it becomes the excuse to finally make the mountain trip you keep putting off, alpine air and a giant soft pretzel and a designated driver who is being a very good sport about all of this. The lake sits right there for a cold, gold-lit walk between rounds when the beer hall finally gets too warm and loud. Bring a group and lederhosen you're not afraid to fully commit to. It fills the Convention Center in Big Bear Lake across nine weekends of autumn.

Buena Park Culture Fest 2026 — Boisseranc Park

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34 days away

Buena Park Culture Fest 2026 — Boisseranc Park

Sep 19, 2026 Boisseranc Park, 7520 Dale St, Bue…

The flag your mother hung in the kitchen window when you were seven, the one that smelled like cooking oil and homesickness and something she never gave a name to, has a day here. Boisseranc Park fills with the Parade of Flags: families walking in traditional clothing, carrying the colors of wherever they came from, kids running ahead because the pool is open and the food vendors are already set up. The performances rotate through cultures like a conversation between neighbors who share a wall and not a language. Then the drone show starts, everyone looks up at the same sky, and nobody needs a translation for that part. Free admission, community booths where you learn something about the family next door, crafts, games in the grass, and a mural that gains one more handprint every year. If you grew up code-switching between your parents' language and the one you used at school, this already belongs to you. If you did not, come eat something your own culture never figured out how to make.

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35 days away

Magic of the Jack O'Lanterns

Sep 19, 2026 South Coast Botanic Garden, 26300 …

Halloween used to be gentler than this. Before the fake blood and the jump scares it was really just wonder at a candle inside a carved face, and somebody here decided to multiply that past the point of reason until an evening walk turns into something close to reverence. A mile-long trail through the botanic garden, lit by more than ten thousand hand-carved pumpkins. No monsters. No screaming. Just warm orange light and craftsmanship that makes no economic sense whatsoever. Some are portraits. Some are whole scenes. Every one of them is lit from inside and will be compost within a week, which is somehow the part that stays with you. It is built for families with small kids, for couples who want atmosphere without adrenaline, and for people who love October for its beauty rather than its fear. Bring a jacket and walk slowly. Come if you believe a candle inside a carved face is quietly one of the better things humans do.

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14 Gathering

35 days away

Fright Fest at Six Flags Magic Mountain

Sep 19, 2026 Six Flags Magic Mountain, 26101 Ma…

A coaster you know by heart becomes a different ride entirely when you cannot see the track. The drop arrives when it arrives. Your body gets no warning at all. That is the trade being offered here: the coaster capital of the world keeps running after dark, and in between the rides you have to walk. Through fog. Past people in makeup who have been waiting all night for someone exactly as scared as you, and who can tell instantly which one you are. Haunted mazes, roaming scare zones, and the particular cruelty of a chainsaw revving somewhere behind you in a crowd. The adrenaline of the drops and the adrenaline of the scares stack until you honestly cannot tell which scream belonged to which. Select nights through the fall at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia. Go with the friends who will absolutely abandon you the second something moves. That is half of the point.

Tanaka Farms Pumpkin Patch 2026 — Irvine

Daily

35 days away

Tanaka Farms Pumpkin Patch 2026 — Irvine

Every day · Next Sep 20 Tanaka Farms, 5380 University Dr, …

One of the only real u-pick pumpkin patches left in Southern California — the kind where you actually walk into the field, pick the one you want off the vine, and carry it back like you earned it. Tanaka Farms runs their fall pumpkin patch and harvest festival from September 20 through November 2, 2026, daily. Thirty acres of working farm transformed into a full-scale fall destination: wagon rides through the pumpkin fields, a corn maze, petting zoo, ATV rides, a pumpkin cannon, and the kind of U-pick experience that reminds you this is farmland, not a parking lot. Weekend parking by reservation only ($12). Tanaka Farms, 5380 3/4 University Dr, Irvine, CA 92612. Tickets and parking at tanakafarms.com. Send this to the parent who wants their kid to know pumpkins grow in the ground, not on a palette at Trader Joe's.

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35 days away

Carlsbad Music Festival 2026

Sep 20 – Sep 22, 2026 Free admission Magee Park, 258 Beech Ave, Carlsba…

Somewhere in the program sits a piece nobody in that park has ever heard — a new commission, or a work getting its first West Coast airing. Being there on the afternoon it first exists in open air, when even the performers do not entirely know how it will land, is the whole reason to come. Free, outdoors, three days of contemporary classical and new music in a park in Carlsbad Village: new commissions, West Coast premieres, experimental chamber works, and collaborations between classical players and musicians out of jazz, electronic, and world traditions. It runs from small chamber pieces to full ensembles under open sky. The grounds back onto a lagoon and the afternoon light across the weekend is the kind people bring up years later. Pre-concert talks and artist meet-and-greets are part of the thing, not an add-on. Magee Park in Carlsbad Village, walkable from the train station. Bring a blanket or a low chair; food trucks are on site. This one is for the friend who finds most outdoor summer concerts too predictable. It takes its audience seriously.

Orange County Children's Book Festival 2026 — Costa Mesa

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35 days away

Orange County Children's Book Festival 2026 — Costa Mesa

Sep 20, 2026 Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairvie…

Your kid is going to pull a book off a table they almost walked past, flip it open, and go quiet in a way that means they've already left the room. The author who wrote it is standing six feet away, and the look on their face is going to make the entire drive down Fairview Road worth it. The OC Children's Book Festival takes over Orange Coast College every September and turns a community college campus into the kind of literary wonderland that makes you wish you were seven again. Authors reading aloud to kids sitting cross-legged on the grass. Illustrators showing how a blank page becomes a character. Live entertainment that actually holds a child's attention without a screen. And books — stacked, displayed, signed, read, clutched — the whole point, never secondary to the spectacle around it. This is a festival that understands its audience. It runs from 10 AM to 3 PM because that's how long a kid's tank lasts. Admission is free because the barrier to a child finding the book that changes them should be zero. And it lands in September because a new school year deserves a story it didn't start with. Sunday, September 20, 2026, 10 AM–3 PM. Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Rd, Costa Mesa, CA 92626. Free admission and parking.

20th Annual LALALA Matsuri 2026 -- Ramen Festival Torrance

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21 Gathering

35 days away

20th Annual LALALA Matsuri 2026 -- Ramen Festival Torrance

Sep 20, 2026 Torrance Cultural Arts Center, 333…

One bowl at this festival does not exist anywhere else in the United States, a limited-edition festival bowl from a shop that flew it in for the day, and when the last one goes it is gone. That is why people queue before the gates open. The Ramen Yokocho, the dedicated ramen street, pulls acclaimed shops from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and directly from Japan, and the roster rotates every year, so even the veterans do not know what is coming. Past the noodles the vendors run deep: yakitori, takoyaki, matcha desserts, Japanese street snacks, imported goods you carry home in a bag you did not plan on buying. Taiko drumming and Japanese dance run through the afternoon, and the whole day carries the weight of the South Bay's Japanese American community, which is what turned a neighborhood gathering into a two-decade fixture on the SoCal calendar. Go hungry, go early, split every bowl. Take the friend who thinks they have already had good ramen.

Coming Soon

36 days away

Chris Janson at Wilson Creek Winery

Sep 20, 2026 $55+ Wilson Creek Winery, 35960 Rancho …

Wine country is supposed to be the mellow option. Somebody booked a harmonica-blasting, piano-pounding country act onto a winery lawn in Temecula anyway, and the polite version of that evening survives about one song. The man behind Buy Me a Boat plays every show like it is the best party in town and he is personally responsible for how it goes. On a lawn under September stars, a bottle of the local pour open beside your chair and everybody around you there for exactly this, the night tips over into something rowdier than the tasting room ever prepared you for. You will be standing by the third song. You will lose your voice somewhere around the encore. Wilson Creek out in the Temecula Valley, a Sunday evening, close enough that nobody has to make a weekend of it. Bring the friend who insists they do not like country music.

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Grand Opening Weekend 2026

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22 Gathering

37 days away

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Grand Opening Weekend 2026

Sep 22, 2026 Exposition Park, 1025 N Figueroa S…

Whatever art shaped you was probably not hanging in a museum. It was a comic strip page, a storyboard, a paperback cover, a frame of animation you rewound until the tape wore thin — and some part of you always knew that counted, with nowhere to point. Now there is somewhere. George Lucas spent decades buying that work, forty thousand pieces of it, and then built an argument in Exposition Park: that Rockwell belongs near Monet, that a Miyazaki storyboard deserves the reverence given a Rembrandt sketch, that narrative art has earned a building instead of an apology. The opening galleries hold more than a thousand works across dozens of rooms, inside a structure by MAD Architects that rises out of the ground like it landed there. It opens in September in Exposition Park, next door to the Natural History Museum and the Science Center, and children get in free. Take the kid who draws in the margins of everything. Let them see what that turns into.

Coming Soon

38 days away

Disney's Beauty and the Beast

Sep 22, 2026 $45+ Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 60…

A whole generation learned what a musical could be from a dancing teapot and a candelabra, and most of them never fully recovered. Put it on a real stage with a full orchestra swelling underneath Be Our Guest, and watch those same people — grown now, frequently with kids of their own — turn into puddles in the dark. This is grand, gold-drenched, family-first Broadway with no apology for any of it: the ballroom, the enchanted castle, the yellow gown lit so it reads from the back row of the hall. The touring production has the scale to actually deliver that ballroom, which is the moment everything hinges on and the one cheap productions always get wrong. Segerstrom in Costa Mesa is an easy stop off the freeway near the mall. Make it a first big theater night for a small person, or go entirely for yourself. Some stories really are worth telling as a tale as old as time.

L.A. Times Food Bowl Night Market 2026 — Paramount Pictures Studios

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10 Gathering

38 days away

L.A. Times Food Bowl Night Market 2026 — Paramount Pictures Studios

Sep 22, 2026 5555 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA …

The gate opens and you're walking onto a backlot that made movies for a hundred years, except tonight the set is real and the stars are the people behind the pass-through windows. The seventh annual L.A. Times Food Bowl Night Market takes over Paramount Pictures Studios on Monday, September 22, 2026 — one ticket unlocking unlimited tastings and drinks from over 120 of Los Angeles' most obsessive restaurants, all of them cooking like they know every other kitchen in the room is watching. This is the night the city's food scene stops being a map and becomes a single room. The chefs you've read about are three feet away, plating something they've been testing for weeks. The ones you haven't read about are the reason you'll leave rethinking everything. Fiesta Friday Night Market runs 8 PM to 11 PM, 21+ only. Paramount Pictures Studios, 5555 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038. Tickets at lafoodbowl.com. The dress code is whatever you wear when you're about to eat more than you planned.

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18 Gathering

40 days away

Knott's Scary Farm 2026

Sep 24 – Oct 31, 2026 Knott's Berry Farm, 8039 Beach Blv…

Every other park has to build its haunted town from scratch each fall. This one already owns a ghost town the other eleven months of the year, and come October it simply stops pretending. That is the unfair advantage, and it is why the format everyone else has spent half a century copying started here in 1973. A dozen-plus mazes, each a real indoor build with professional actors and licensed themes running from slasher to supernatural to genuinely funny. Scare zones that turn the walkways into a gauntlet you cannot opt out of. Four shows going at once. Over a thousand performers on the grounds, which is a density of live human contact no smaller haunt can afford to touch. Buena Park, select nights from late September through Halloween, separate admission from the daytime park, and the weekend nights go first. Bring the friend who insists they don't scare. The monsters here can smell that on a person from across the midway.

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40 days away

202

Queen Mary Dark Harbor 2026

Sep 24 – Oct 31, 2026 Queen Mary, 1126 Queens Hwy, Long …

No haunt built by a theme park can borrow what this one already has: the real thing was terrifying before anyone hung a single prop. The Queen Mary is an actual 1930s ocean liner, moored in Long Beach, with engine rooms that drop seven stories below the waterline and a documented reputation as the most haunted vessel in the world. Dark Harbor just turns the lights off and lets the ship do the work. The mazes run through the ship's genuine spaces — the boiler rooms deep under the water, the historic first-class staterooms, the outdoor decks where the harbor wind does something no fog machine can. Some corridors run hundreds of feet through complete darkness, and the scale isn't designed, it's just how big the ship is. There's a scare zone in the festival tent, live entertainment, and the old first-class dining room running as an event space — but the reason to come is the hull itself, and the way real history is scarier than anything invented. 1126 Queens Hwy, Long Beach — select nights through October 2026, separate event ticket, advance purchase for the weekend nights. Bring the friend who swears they don't believe in ghosts and watch how fast the ship changes their mind.

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