OC's unalike beach towns in NYT Travel

Writer Jeff Gordinier used to summer around Laguna Beach and Newport Beach, and spent some time there this summer for a New York Times Travel piece that ran this weekend. Sample:

Big money and luxury development have transformed Laguna Beach over the last couple of decades. A town that used to be associated with Timothy Leary’s acid trips is now defined by eight-figure real estate deals and the vapid gleam of pop culture. I longed to find a few pockets of Laguna and Newport that hadn’t had any work done — the Ferris wheels, the roadside spots where a surfer might score a hot-salsa-laced breakfast burrito after a foggy morning on the board, the tide pools along the shoreline at Crystal Cove.

And just as the park rangers have tried to protect those tide pools, I hoped that the legions of visitors and new arrivals had kept their pushy, probing digits away from the freakier urchins and anemones. It’s only human, I suppose, to see our youthful haunts as fragile ecosystems, constantly under the threat of extinction.

Here's the story.

LA Observed photo of Laguna Beach