~5 min read

Good morning. Fall officially starts Tuesday, and Orange County will mark the occasion by being 80° and sunny with 73° water. This weekend: PCH shuts down so 4,000 people can run on it, a book festival takes over a college campus, and Burger Week opens its doors. ☕

This week in OC: In September 1959, a Cal State Long Beach student named Peter Beltran talked the city of Huntington Beach into hosting the first West Coast Surfboard Championships at the pier — his pitch was that surfers were athletes, not beach bums. Five divisions, 75 entrants. Jack Haley won the men's by shooting the pier twice in one ride — through, turn around, back through. Sixty-seven Septembers later, that little contest is the US Open of Surfing, and this Sunday the same stretch of PCH hosts OC's oldest race (below).

In today's Buzz:

— Kevin

PCH closes Sunday morning, and it's a good thing. Only three days a year do all four lanes of Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach close to cars: the Fourth of July, the Surf City Marathon in February, and this Sunday — the Surf City 10.

It's the oldest race of any distance in Orange County and one of the first 10-milers in the country. It started in the mid-1950s as the Huntington Beach Distance Derby, ran on the beach path for 56 years, then moved onto PCH and got its new name in 2011. This year the organizers are calling it 70 years. Around 4,000 runners line up in front of the pier, head north toward Bolsa Chica with the ocean on one side and the wetlands on the other, and come back to a beer garden and free ice cream from Handel's.

Even if you never run a step: it's the one morning a year you can stand in the middle of PCH at Main Street and hear waves instead of traffic.

Here's what to know:

More: surfcity10.com

Forward this to the friend who says they're "training for something."

Worth leaving the house for (Fri Sept 18 – Sun Sept 20). Beach note: the water's still 73°, the crowds are gone, and Sunday morning the only traffic on PCH in HB is on foot.

🏃 Surf City 10 — Sat–Sun (Huntington Beach pier). The Big Thing. See above. Non-runners: go watch the Beach Mile Saturday at 9am. It's a mile in soft sand and it's hilarious.

🧹 California Coastal Cleanup Day — Sat Sept 19, morning (county-wide). The 42nd annual, and OC Coastkeeper is coordinating 35+ sites across the county — Bolsa Chica, Huntington State Beach (the biggest, 400+ people), Crystal Cove, Salt Creek, San Clemente, plus inland creeks and channels. Register for your site ahead of time — spots are limited — and bring your own bucket and gloves if you can. Free, and the beach looks better at noon than it did at 9. → coastkeeper.org

📚 22nd Orange County Children's Book Festival — Sun Sept 20, 10am–3pm (Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa). Free admission, free parking, 100+ authors, illustrators and exhibitors across the OCC campus. Details in the Kids section. → kidsbookfestival.com

🚗 San Clemente 30th Annual Car Show — Sun Sept 20, 10am–3pm (Avenida Del Mar). 250+ classics parked down the whole slope of Del Mar, live music, slot cars, food, about 15,000 people. Free for spectators, dogs welcome, free trolleys all day. → sccarshow.com

🍺 Oktoberfest at Old World Village — now through Sun Nov 8 (Huntington Beach). Wed–Sun every week, "OC's biggest party since 1977": German bands, the bratwurst, and the dachshund races later in the run. Some weekday tickets are free; weekend nights up to about $50. Free parking in the structure behind the hotel. ($) → oldworldhb.com

🏜️ Sand Sports Super Show — Fri Sept 18 (4–10pm), Sat (9–7), Sun (9–4) (OC Fair & Event Center, Costa Mesa). The world's largest sand-sports expo — 400+ exhibitors of UTVs, sand rails and dune gear. Very OC-in-the-fall. $20 adults / $10 kids 6–12 / 5 & under free; parking $15. ($) → sandsportssupershow.com

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

A free day where your kids beg you for books (Sun Sept 20, Costa Mesa). The OC Children's Book Festival takes over Orange Coast College (2701 Fairview Rd) from 10 to 3 — 100+ children's authors, illustrators, storytellers, bookstores and literacy groups, from the Main Quad to the Planetarium. The headliner is Rachel Ignotofsky (Women in Science) presenting inside the Planetarium dome at 11am — my plan with my three is to be parked by 10:30 for that, then let them loose. Also on the bill: Melissa Villaseñor (Cat and Lola: School Picture Day) and Jesus Trejo (Mamá's Magnificent Dancing Plantitas). Free, free parking. → kidsbookfestival.com

Coastal Cleanup Day (Sat Sept 19, morning). The free family volunteer morning of the year: kids get a bucket, a mission, and a beach. Pick the site nearest you and register ahead — under-18s need a parent-signed waiver at most sites, so do it online before you go. → coastkeeper.org

Beach Mile (Sat Sept 19, 9am, HB pier). One mile in the sand, medal for every finisher, 45-minute time limit — a lot of families do it together. From $33 per runner ($). If your kids won't run, spectating at the pier Sunday morning is free, and the finish has a beer garden for you. → surfcity10.com

Cheap extras: Sand Sports Super Show is free for kids 5 & under, $10 for 6–12 · Irvine Park Railroad's pumpkin patch opened last weekend · Wild Rivers has no swim days this weekend — remaining 2026 days are Oct 3–4 and Oct 10–11.

Evergreen backups: Crystal Cove tide pools at low tide, Irvine Park Railroad, Santa Ana Zoo, the Bolsa Chica wetlands loop.

The IHOP corner on Main Street is a bistro now. Champagnes Kitchen — the Newport Beach bistro-and-deli that's been around since 1989 — opened its second location this spring at 200 Main St, Huntington Beach, the corner of Main & Olive that spent 26 years as an IHOP. The HB version is the bigger swing: 3,950 square feet, full dinner service from 4pm, a six-seat bar with craft cocktails, and an espresso bar pouring Costa Mesa roaster Moon Goat. Owners Matt and Winnona Tobey raised their kids in HB and picked this block on purpose. Open 8am–10pm Sun–Thu, till midnight Fri–Sat. It's been open four months, so the kitchen is dialed — and it's on the Burger Week list (below). → champagneskitchenoc.com

Coming to the pier, finally. The old Ruby's spot at the end of the HB pier has sat empty since 2021. The replacement — Huntington's on the Pier, a full-service restaurant and bar with 360° views — is under construction and targeting fall 2026, after a four-year permitting slog. Five years without a pier restaurant; when this one opens, it's a Big Thing. → huntingtonsotp.com

Burger Week starts Sunday — here are the picks. Sun Sept 20 – Sat Sept 26. Roughly 70 restaurants, no tickets or passes, burger menus tiered from $10 to $35 (the $30/$35 tier pairs a wine or cocktail), plus vegan and vegetarian menus. Every menu is at burgerweek.com — some restaurants are still posting theirs this week.

Coffee first: the espresso bar inside Champagnes Kitchen pours Moon Goat — the coffee-before-the-pier stop on Main Street that isn't a chain.

Round one did the pier and downtown. Round two (issue #8) did everything that isn't the pier — Old World Village, the Bolsa Chica wetlands, Central Park, the Golden Bear. Round three is the water you can't see from PCH, and the pier you can:

Next issue: Newport Beach round three, or Irvine (still owed since issue #7). Reply and vote.

Market pulse (week of Sept 14, 2026): the five-week inventory slide is over — 5,032 homes for sale, up from 4,984 — because closings fell hard (358, down from 443) while new listings rose. But the closed numbers went the other way: the single-family median closed price jumped $90K to $1,550,000 and median days on market ticked down to 45. The useful part is the caveat: mortgage rates crossed 7% for the first time this year, and this week's closings went into contract in mid-August at 6.7%. The 7% effect hasn't hit the closing table yet. Where it'll show first is the under-$1M segment — just 1,899 of 5,032 listings, about a third of the county. Two-thirds of OC inventory sits above $1M, where buyers are equity-driven, not payment-driven. Translation: the national "housing is slowing" headline is a first-time-buyer story, and in OC that's a minority of the market. → ocrealestateinc.com

The wild one: 16932 Coral Cay, Huntington Beach — $7,500,000. The most expensive house in Surf City doesn't face the surf. It's the flagship of Coral Cay, a guard-gated enclave inside Huntington Harbour: a pie-shaped point lot with 100+ feet of Main Channel frontage, a private dock built for multiple boats, 4 beds / 5 baths, about 4,600 square feet, a separate guest suite, and neighborhood extras most beach towns don't have — a private sandy beach and tennis and pickleball courts. Built 1978. The receipt is the fun part: it last sold for $2.8M in 2001. Now it's asking $7.5M — about $1,623 a foot — and the Cruise of Lights goes right past the dock. → redfin.com

Then: the beach was a forest of oil derricks.

The first Huntington Beach well came in on May 24, 1920, and within eighteen months there were 59 wells pumping. Land that had been lima beans and sand turned into a boomtown overnight. For the next half-century, the HB skyline — and the beach itself — was wooden derricks, then pump jacks, nodding between PCH and the water. The stretch north of the pier got so cluttered with drums and shacks that locals called it "Tin Can Beach." If you drove PCH in the '70s and '80s, you remember the smell.

Now: the state cleaned up Tin Can Beach and made it Bolsa Chica State Beach in 1961. The wells on the ocean side of PCH north of the pier were capped in a landmark city deal with Chevron. The wetlands the oil companies leased became the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. The oil field is still technically producing — over a billion barrels lifetime — but the derricks between you and the ocean are gone, and the few pump jacks left in town are the ones the city kept as landmarks.

You know you're from OC if you learned to surf between the oil wells and thought that was normal.

Now you: hit reply with your favorite OC memory — the ride, the restaurant, the thing you wore. The best ones run right here, and the reader-takeover issue is coming.

That's the week. Stand in the middle of PCH on Sunday morning, fill a bucket on Saturday, and eat a burger every day next week.

Three tiny favors:

1. Hit reply with your OC memory. I'm collecting for the reader-takeover issue.

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's been "training for something" since 2019.

See you next week.

— Kevin

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