If you find yourself in Malibu for any reason, stop by the Pepperdine university campus and check out this grass field. If there aren't any lacrosse practices happening, then you can sit and fell like you're on the edge of the world.

Private and romantic

Only about 45 minutes from Los Angeles, this is a great quick campground for a one night escape from the city.

Built on Carroll Avenue in the late 1880s, this is a short walk to look at these old houses. There is the Thriller house from Michael Jackson clip on the 1345 Carroll Av

Salton Sea is not technically LA, but is a by-product of its history and my first-choice escape from the city: one of the world's largest inland seas and lowest spots on earth, a man-made lake in the midst of the Colorado desert, a resort area in the twenties turned in one of the worst ecological disaster of the past century.