~5 min read

Good morning. The water's still warm, the beach lot still has spaces at noon, and as of today South Coast Plaza has a bookstore again for the first time since Borders. ☕

This week in OC: Laguna's Sawdust Art Festival is closing out its 60th season. It started in the mid-1960s when a group of artists got rejected by the Festival of Arts jury and threw their own show on a vacant lot at the bottom of Park Ave. The press called it the "Rejects Festival." Sixty years later, the rejects are an institution.

In today's Buzz:

— Kevin

The bookstore comes back. Barnes & Noble opens a 27,000-square-foot flagship at South Coast Plaza yesterday — upper level, in the old Sports Chalet space, which before that was a Borders. Author Tahereh Mafi cuts the ribbon and signs books at 10 a.m.

Here's why it lands: South Coast Plaza hasn't had a real bookstore since Borders — and this is literally that room. The last Barnes & Noble in Costa Mesa, over at Metro Pointe, closed in 2016. Ten years later, a mall better known for Chanel and Gucci is getting a room full of paperbacks, a café, and an outdoor patio.

Here's what to know:

More: barnesandnobleinc.com

Forward this to the friend who still says "I'll just grab it at Borders."

Worth leaving the house for (Fri Aug 28 – Sun Aug 30):

⛵ Yachty by Nature — Sat Aug 29, 2–6pm (SeaLegs at the Beach, Bolsa Chica, HB). A yacht-rock cover band on the sand, PCH between Seapoint and Warner. Free with beach parking. Bring the low chair and zero shame. → sealegsatthebeach.com

🎨 Laguna's last art weekend-ish — Fri–Sun (Festival of Arts, 650 Laguna Canyon Rd). Live music on the grounds — Fast Lane Allstars Friday at 5:30, Family Style Saturday at 5:30 — plus Art-To-Go write-in bidding Saturday 6–8. The whole season closes Sept 3, so this is the "we keep meaning to go" weekend. ($) → foapom.com

🎬 Top Gun under the stars — Fri Aug 28 (Bluff Park at Salt Creek Beach, Dana Point). OC Parks' Sunset Cinema. Free parking from 6pm, movie at sunset around 8, food trucks on site. Ocean at your back, Maverick on the screen. Free. → ocparks.com

💎 Gem Faire — Fri–Sun (OC Fair & Event Center, Costa Mesa). Gems, minerals, beads, and jewelry from vendors all over the country. Fri noon–6, Sat 10–6, Sun 10–5. ($7; free for kids under 12 and seniors 70+; parking $15.) → gemfaire.com

🎻 Free Park Performance — Sat Aug 29, 6:30–7:20pm (Shiffer Park, Costa Mesa). A string quartet playing Haydn, Gershwin, Dvořák, and John Williams. City-run, free, fifty minutes, done before bedtime. → costamesaca.gov

(Double-check times before you go — events move.)

Wild Rivers is about to go weekends-only. The park runs its last weekday "After School Slides" hours (3–7pm) through Monday Aug 31, then drops to weekends through Oct 11. Check the calendar first — a couple of late-August days are dark — but if your kids have one more water-park day in them, this is the week it's still a Thursday-after-school option instead of a Saturday production. ($)

Which is the part that gets me: my three get a Wild Rivers. I got the Wild Rivers. More on that below. → wildrivers.com

Top Gun on the bluff, kid mode. Free, outdoors, food trucks, and a PG movie you will absolutely quote out loud. Bring a blanket and a hoodie — that bluff gets cold the second the sun drops. (See Around Town.)

Evergreen backups: Crystal Cove tide pools at low tide, Irvine Park Railroad, Santa Ana Zoo.

Bag check. Erewhon — the LA luxury-grocery phenomenon — signed for the old T-Shirts Warehouse at 140 E. 17th St. in Costa Mesa, its first Orange County store, targeting a 2027 opening. Whatever you think about a $20 smoothie, 17th Street just got more interesting. → ocbj.com

Cookie season. Levain Bakery, the NYC six-ounce-cookie legend, opens its first Orange County store at Fashion Island in early September, near Macy's. File this under act-smug-later. → whatnow.com

Orange Inn — Laguna Beach. Spotlight-city pick. Open since 1931, back when it was a roadside juice stand serving cowboys and Irvine Ranch field hands on the dirt road between Newport and Laguna. It claims to have invented the smoothie — strawberries, bananas, dates, juice, ice, and a sprinkle of bee pollen, still on the menu as the Original Smoothie. Esquire once called it one of the ten best roadside restaurants in America.

Doors open at 6 a.m. Get the smoothie, get a breakfast burrito, eat it across the street. 703 S. Coast Hwy. → orangeinncafe.com

Laguna got the spotlight early in our run, so these are the deeper cuts:

Next issue: continuing round two down the corridor — Dana Point.

Market pulse (week of Aug 24, 2026): the single-family median closed price bounced back to $1,500,000 — the strongest reading in several weeks. But homes are sitting longer: median days on market jumped to 44 from 41, the biggest one-week move in that number all year. Inventory dipped for a second straight week to 5,136, with 424 closings. Prices up, patience required. → ocrealestateinc.com

The wild one: 42 acres in Trabuco Canyon — $299,000. Last week we showed you a $112 million Laguna compound with a rotating bed. This week, the other end of the county entirely: forty-two acres of raw, agriculturally zoned Orange County land, at the end of a cul-de-sac off Topanga Canyon Road, for less than the down payment on a Newport condo.

To be clear about what you're buying: no house, no utilities, no promises — the listing says "buyer to verify all info," which is realtor for good luck. But the median OC house is now $1.5 million, and this is 42 acres for $299K. Somebody's building something out there. → redfin.com

(Soon we'll feature a real for-sale home here every week. OC agent with a listing people should gawk at? Reply to this email — let's talk.)

(angle this week: Gone But Not Forgotten)

The Irvine dirt that had three lives.

Lion Country Safari opened in June 1970 off the 405 — a drive-through African game preserve where you rolled your windows up and inched the family sedan past lions, elephants, rhinos, zebras, and ostriches. It closed in 1984.

Then the same land became Wild Rivers, which opened in July 1986 and ran twenty-five summers. If you grew up here in the '80s or '90s you know exactly what that walk from the parking lot felt like — the hot asphalt, the smell of chlorine and sunscreen, the sprint to get in line before the crowd. The Irvine Company declined to renew the lease after 2011. Today that ground is the Los Olivos apartments and some retail.

Lions, then water slides, then a leasing office. Same dirt, three completely different childhoods.

The happy ending: Wild Rivers came back, over at the Great Park, and it's open right now. Your kids get a version of it. You got the original.

Now you: what OC ride or attraction do you still miss? Hit reply — I'll run the best ones.

That's the week. Buy a book you don't need, take a blanket to the bluff on Friday, and get to Laguna before the art comes down.

Three tiny favors:

1. Hit reply and tell me the OC ride or attraction you still miss. I'm collecting them.

2. Refer 2 friends with your link below and I'll send you the OC Insider's Guide (free). It's genuinely good.

3. Forward this to the friend who still can't drive past Los Olivos without saying "that used to be Wild Rivers."

See you next week.

— Kevin

Want your OC business in front of these readers? This spot's open. Reply to this email or write [email protected] and let's talk.