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San Diego Lowrider Car Show & Cruise 2026

Coming Soon

21 days away

San Diego Lowrider Car Show & Cruise 2026

Sep 6, 2026 Chicano Park, 1949 Logan Ave, San …

The hydraulics hit and the whole block turns its head. The San Diego Lowrider Car Show & Cruise rolls through the city on September 6 for a free, end-of-summer celebration of Chicano culture, music, and the art of making a car dance. Lowriders from across SoCal line up — candy paint glowing, chrome wire wheels catching the afternoon sun, interiors upholstered in velvet patterns that took someone's uncle six months to finish. The cruise brings them through the streets in formation, hydraulics popping, sound systems competing, families lining the route with lawn chairs and coolers. This is not a car show where you stand behind a rope. This is the neighborhood flexing — a tradition that stretches back generations in San Diego's Chicano community, where building a lowrider is an act of artistic expression, family pride, and cultural continuity. The music shifts between oldies, cumbia, and Chicano rap. The food is homemade. The kids are on someone's shoulders. Free admission. Free to join the cruise. September 6, 2026. 12:30 PM – 5:00 PM. San Diego.

Monthly

61 Gathering

22 days away

SD Kollective Night Market

Monthly · Next Sep 6 Free National City, San Diego, CA

The lawn chairs are the tell. Nobody hauls a folding chair to a shopping event. They bring one to a place they intend to stay a while, and that is what the south bay figured out about this one before anybody else did. A San Diego non-profit runs it on a stubborn premise: give small food businesses, independent artists, and community organizations a platform, and charge nobody at the door — not the vendors who could never afford a higher-barrier market, and not you. What comes out the other side reads less like a curated marketplace and more like a neighborhood that happened to bring dinner. Street food across a stack of cuisines, craft tables, community groups tabling, a DJ working the afternoon into the evening, kids underfoot the whole time. Free entry, all ages, National City, late afternoon into dusk. If you have been looking for the version of San Diego that feeds you before it asks who you are, this is it. Bring a chair.

San Diego Auto Swap & Car Show — Pechanga Arena

Coming Soon

22 days away

San Diego Auto Swap & Car Show — Pechanga Arena

Sep 7, 2026 Pechanga Arena San Diego, 3500 Spo…

The alarm goes off before dawn and you do not hit snooze. That is how you know it is swap meet day. By first light the lots are already moving — vendors laying parts and signs and memorabilia across folding tables, and the people with flashlights and cash working the rows before the sun clears the arena. Whatever gets found in that first hour is what everybody else spends the rest of the day asking about. This is not a concours. It is a parking lot full of people who speak the same language: carburetors, matching numbers, barn finds, the one that got away. Classic trucks beside lowriders beside a Camaro somebody drove down from Riverside to show what two winters in a garage produced. Walk the rows and listen to the owners; it is the best accidental education in automotive history available anywhere. Cash is king at the swap tables — the good stuff does not wait for Venmo. Go early. Come home with something you did not know you needed.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band with Bobby Rush

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23 days away

Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band with Bobby Rush

Sep 7, 2026 $60+ South Coast Winery Resort & Spa, 3…

Few guitarists alive play the blues like Kenny Wayne Shepherd, who has been melting faces since he was a teenager; pairing him with the Grammy-winning bluesman Bobby Rush makes this one of the best blues bills to hit the Temecula Valley all year. South Coast Winery's Rhythm on the Vine series sets it all in the Vintner's Garden, an intimate outdoor stage surrounded by vineyards. Sunday, September 7, 2026, at South Coast Winery Resort in Temecula. Come for searing slide guitar and deep Delta soul, bring a bottle and a blanket, and let the blues roll across the vines as the sun goes down. If you have ever chased a guitar tone down a rabbit hole, this is your church. This is the real thing, playing in your own backyard. Come get the blues, the good kind.

Water for Elephants — Broadway in Hollywood

Coming Soon

24 days away

Water for Elephants — Broadway in Hollywood

Sep 8, 2026 Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 H…

We keep telling stories about running away with the circus because some part of us never entirely stopped wanting to. This one takes that ache and puts real acrobats in the air above it. A young man loses everything, jumps a moving train in the dark, and lands inside a Depression-era traveling show full of danger and wonder and one impossible love. The touring production folds genuine aerialists and hand-balancers into the storytelling, so the spectacle is not a metaphor for anything — it is physically happening over the actors' heads while they sing. Seven Tony nominations, adapted from the novel everybody's mother read the same year. Under the gilded ceiling on Hollywood Boulevard, one night in September, and fine for kids around eight and up. The people who still look twice at a passing train will feel every minute of it. Take the one you know does that.

Monthly

294 Gathering

26 days away

294

OC Night Market 2026 — Orange County

Monthly · Next Sep 10 Paid admission — see ocnightmarket.com 88 Fair Dr, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

The food is the gravity. Everything else is what you do while you wait in line for it. Vendors span Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the fusion concepts that exist nowhere but here — Korean corn dogs, Taiwanese popcorn chicken, banh mi, takoyaki, Filipino bibingka, Hong Kong egg waffles, Thai rolled ice cream, and dozens of hybrids that would not survive anywhere less adventurous. Over 200 vendors across a sprawling outdoor ground that only comes alive once it is fully dark. Beyond the food: live K-pop sets, a DJ stage, merchandise sellers with streetwear and phone cases and plushies and art prints, and an activity zone of carnival games. It is dense and loud and celebratory, which is the actual point — this is what an Asian night market feels like, run at SoCal scale. OC Fair & Event Center, 88 Fair Dr, Costa Mesa. Paid parking on-site. Admission at the gate; dates and pricing at ocnightmarket.com. Get there by 6. The best stalls build their lines before the crowd peaks.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey: The Greatest Show On Earth — Pechanga Arena San Diego

Coming Soon

26 days away

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey: The Greatest Show On Earth — Pechanga Arena San Diego

Sep 10, 2026 Pechanga Arena San Diego, 3500 Spo…

Every kid in the room will hold their breath at the same time just before the lights go down — and so will every adult who forgot they used to be one of those kids. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey returns to Pechanga Arena San Diego from September 10 through 13, 2026, bringing a reimagined Greatest Show On Earth that has traded animal acts for a diverse cast of global performers — aerial artists, acrobats, and clowns whose only job is to make you forget you have a phone in your pocket. The show runs seven performances across four days: evening shows at 7 PM on Thursday and Friday, three shows Saturday at 11 AM, 3 PM, and 7 PM, and matinees Sunday at noon and 4 PM. All guests age two and older need a ticket. Pechanga Arena at 3500 Sports Arena Boulevard in the Midway District is the venue. Bring the kids. Bring the grandparents. Bring whoever forgot what wonder looks like.

Sub Urban: The Bell Tolls Tour — SOMA, San Diego

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26 days away

Sub Urban: The Bell Tolls Tour — SOMA, San Diego

Sep 10, 2026 SOMA, 3350 Sports Arena Blvd, San …

Sub Urban makes music that sounds like someone left the lights on in a haunted house and a DJ showed up. Dark-pop with production so dense it practically has texture — the kind of songs that live on playlists titled things your parents wouldn't approve of, streamed by the demographic that discovered him through 'Cradles' and stayed for the whole uncanny valley. The Bell Tolls Tour brings the Taiwanese American singer-songwriter to SOMA's Sidestage for an all-ages, standing-room-only show that will pack the room with the exact crowd you'd expect: people who know every lyric, dressed like they coordinate with the album art, filming vertically. SOMA's Sidestage is the intimate configuration — closer quarters, louder per capita, the kind of venue where you feel the bass in your sternum. Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 8:00 PM. SOMA, 3350 Sports Arena Blvd, San Diego, CA 92110. All ages, general admission, standing room only.

Dana Point Maritime Festival 2026 — Ocean Institute

Daily

26 days away

Dana Point Maritime Festival 2026 — Ocean Institute

Every day · Next Sep 11 Ocean Institute, 24200 Dana Point …

Tall ships come into the harbor looking like they wandered out of a century that never actually ended. For three days they belong to you — board them, walk the deck, put your hand on rigging somebody still maintains by hand. Then the cannons start, and the sound comes back off the water in a way no film has ever gotten right. Pirates roam the grounds with the swagger of people who have been doing this for decades and refuse to stop. There are mermaids, or at least people who commit entirely to being mermaids at a maritime festival, which is its own category of magic. Around the spectacle sits the real thing: ocean science exhibits, dockside demonstrations, a beer garden pouring local, live music that sounds better bouncing off water, food trucks down the harbor. Kids learn how a sextant works. Adults learn how a cannon fires. Bring somebody small. Watch them decide, on the spot, to become a sailor.

Creep It Real OC 2026 — Halloween Festival at Heritage Museum

Coming Soon

26 days away

Creep It Real OC 2026 — Halloween Festival at Heritage Museum

Sep 11, 2026 Heritage Museum of Orange County, …

The decorations went up in your garage before the leaves changed. You already know. You've been waiting since last November. Creep It Real OC returns for its 7th year at the Heritage Museum of Orange County, September 11–13, with this year's Vintage Halloween and Hometown Halloween theme hitting the exact frequency your childhood still broadcasts on. Over 130 vendors fill the grounds with handmade horror art, vintage collectibles, and things that look like they were pulled from someone's attic in 1983. Roaming characters, live music, photo ops, and food trucks round out a weekend that smells like October even though September hasn't finished. Kids 10 and under get in free with a paid parent ticket. Pets are welcome and encouraged to come in costume — because of course they are. This is kid-friendly and pet-friendly and perfectly weird. This is not a haunted house. This is the feeling of being twelve years old and knowing exactly which house in the neighborhood goes hardest. Except now you're surrounded by a thousand people who all grew up on that same block.

Original Lobster Festival 2026 – Fountain Valley

Coming Soon

45 Gathering

26 days away

Original Lobster Festival 2026 – Fountain Valley

Sep 11 – Sep 13, 2026 Fountain Valley Sports Park, Fount…

Split and dripping, whole Maine lobster for less than a restaurant charges for the bisque alone — that is the pitch, and the line moves faster than you expect because everyone ahead of you already knows what they want. Rolls, bisque, mac and cheese, and whatever variation the vendors talked themselves into this year. It started at Rainbow Lagoon in Long Beach and grew until it needed a park to hold it, and the People's Choice competition for best lobster dish drags genuinely serious regional kitchens into a fight over bragging rights. Around the eating: SoCal craft beer and wine, an artisan marketplace, live music across stages, and carnival rides for whoever is too young to care about crustaceans. Three days in September at the Fountain Valley sports park, sitting centrally in Orange County, with weekend sessions that sell through in advance. Go with the person who orders lobster every time and pretends it is a special occasion.

Coming Soon

27 days away

Howl-O-Scream 2026 — SeaWorld San Diego

Sep 11, 2026 SeaWorld San Diego, 500 Sea World …

One version of you loves being scared. The other version pretends otherwise. Both of them want to go, and only one is going to admit it in the parking lot. Five haunted houses open across the park after dark, each engineered to find a different frequency of dread you assumed you had outgrown. One drops you into a Mardi Gras gone wrong, bayou witches walking you through a graveyard that refuses to stay quiet. Another puts you inside a house that feeds on whatever fear you carried through the door. The coasters run in the dark, which changes everything about a ride you thought you knew, and the scare zones between houses mean there is no safe path from one to the next. Select nights through the fall, with admission starting hours before the screaming does. Bring the friend who grabs your arm and then denies it in the car.

Coming Soon

27 days away

Clay Walker at Wilson Creek Winery

Sep 11, 2026 $55+ Wilson Creek Winery, 35960 Rancho …

For anyone who came of age on 90s country radio, Clay Walker is pure muscle memory: If I Could Make a Living, Live Until I Die, hit after neotraditional hit, delivered by a voice that has aged like the good stuff. Hearing those songs live under the Temecula stars, vineyard breeze and a glass of local red in hand, is about as good as a Southern California summer night gets. Friday, September 11, 2026, at Wilson Creek Winery in Temecula. Come early to wander the grounds, grab a bottle, and settle onto the lawn as the sun drops behind the hills. The whole crowd turns into the backup choir by the second chorus. This is wine country doing what it does best, turning a concert into a whole gorgeous evening. Fifteen minutes from home and worlds away. Come raise a glass.

Coming Soon

37 Gathering

27 days away

Lowrider Super Show Los Angeles 2026

Sep 12, 2026 Varies Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

Ask the man standing next to the car who started the build and you will get an uncle, a garage, and a decade. That is what outsiders miss walking this floor: every candy panel, every airbrushed hood, every set of wire wheels is a household's worth of patience handed down through a neighborhood. Hundreds of them come here to be seen, indoors, so weather never gets a vote. It is not a static show either. The hoppers bounce on a schedule, the systems hit hard enough to feel in your sternum, and the culture is switched on from open to close. Custom trucks, motorcycles, bicycles built to the same obsessive standard. Trophies handed out all day for everything from paint to hydraulics. Downtown at the convention center, a full day, parking in the structures on Pico and Figueroa. Come early. The floor is deep, and the best conversations happen standing next to the cars.

Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture 2026

Coming Soon

21 Gathering

27 days away

Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture 2026

Sep 12 – Sep 13, 2026 Point Fermin Park, 807 Paseo Del M…

Ask how anyone found the food section and you get the same answer three times over: somebody told them. Not a listing, not an ad — a cousin, a coworker, a person who went once and could not shut up about it afterward. Pancit, lumpia, lechon, sinigang, halo-halo, and the regional dishes that shift from one island province to the next. Four decades in, this is among the largest gatherings of Filipino and Filipino American art and community anywhere in the country, and it is free, outdoors, and organized by the people it is for rather than by an outside producer who studied the market. That distinction shows up everywhere. Folk dance companies and Kulintang ensembles share the main stage with Fil-Am songwriters, original theater, and film, putting the generation that arrived and the generation born here into the same afternoon on purpose. Two days in September, tens of thousands of people, no ticket. Send it to the friend whose lola's cooking you have heard about for years.

Sunset Cliffs Auto Show 2026 — Presented by Hodad's

Coming Soon

27 days away

Sunset Cliffs Auto Show 2026 — Presented by Hodad's

Sep 12, 2026 Free The Inn at Sunset Cliffs, 1370 Sun…

Mid-morning, the marine layer burns off and the cars start rolling in one at a time, which is the best part of the day and almost nobody arrives early enough to watch it. Five blocks off the water, with a burger counter across the way that has been standing longer than most of the metal on display. It is a neighborhood show and it stays one. Custom builds parked beside family classics beside the same regulars who bring the same car every year and would be missed if they skipped it. Local car clubs run the thing, the money goes back into Ocean Beach, and while there are awards on the line including Best in Show, most owners are really there to stand next to it and talk to whoever stops. Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, late morning into the afternoon, free to walk through. Take somebody who says car shows are not for them and let the backdrop do the work.

Coming Soon

62 Gathering

27 days away

Armenian Festival Glendale 2026

Sep 12 – Sep 13, 2026 Glendale, CA 91205

The smell of khorovats over open flame reaches you before the music does, and if your family came from anywhere near this part of the world, it reaches something older than memory. Glendale holds the largest Armenian community in America — a hundred thousand people who built an entire cultural world here across generations, out of what survived 1915 and the waves of leaving that followed. Once a year, all of that steps out of the churches and homes and into the open. This is not a heritage exhibit staged for outsiders; it's a community being itself out loud, and it happens to hold the door open for everyone. The food is the argument — dolma, manti, lahmajoun, and a pastry table of pakhlava and gata people plan their whole afternoon around — while the music runs from the low ache of the duduk to folk songs to Armenian pop the teenagers know every word of. You come for the food and leave having felt the weight of a people who refused to disappear. Central Glendale, typically in September — the venue varies year to year, so confirm location and dates with the Armenian American Cultural Foundation. Free or low-cost, reachable by Metrolink and local bus.

Coming Soon

27 days away

Cardiff Greek Festival 2026

Sep 12, 2026 3459 Manchester Ave, Cardiff-by-th…

One weekend every September, a quiet stretch of coast in Cardiff-by-the-Sea fills with the smell of slow-roasted lamb, the sound of bouzouki, and the kind of dancing that pulls strangers into the line by the second song. The Cardiff Greek Festival has been the parish's gift to North County for decades — hosted by the Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church, run by the families who cook the food themselves. Expect souvlaki and gyros, spanakopita and loukoumades fried to order, Greek wine and coffee, church tours, a marketplace of imported goods, and live music with traditional dancing all afternoon. It is small, warm, and deeply local — the opposite of a corporate festival. The Cardiff Greek Festival runs Saturday, September 12 and Sunday, September 13, 2026, at 3459 Manchester Avenue, Cardiff-by-the-Sea. Admission is free; bring cash for the food, and come hungry. Parking is tight along Manchester Avenue, so most regulars walk or bike in from the coast and make a slow afternoon of it. Come for the food, stay for the dancing — by late afternoon the courtyard is moving and nobody stays a stranger for long.

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