There are more than 1,000 species of Rhododendrons found in the world, plus thousands of cultivated varieties. Rhododendrons fill the towns and forests on the Mendocino Coast with color from January to June. At Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens you can find exotic and rare species as well as cultivars of many sizes, shapes, and hues along winding forested trails.

his year’s Mendocino Music Festival has a spectacular line-up of concerts with music to suit nearly every taste. Classical and jazz events are interspersed throughout the two-week time frame. Sweet Honey in the Rock® is a Grammy Award-winning group of African American women whose a cappella spirituals and gospel music preserves the African American traditions while addressing the critical issues of our time.

Does viewing the country’s largest Killer Whale skeleton sound exciting? How about being surrounded by a virtual kelp forest inside a geodesic dome? Making marine art, listening to a lecture about ocean edibles, or finding out how a 3D scanner/printer works? If these sound like fun, you’re in luck. You can do all this and more at the Noyo Center for Marine Science’s new Discovery Center, downtown in Fort Bragg.