Next time, don't go to Yosemite and bitch about the crowds. Consider a secret little place my family's been vacationing in for years now: Three Rivers. A tiny town in the foothills of the Sequoias, Three Rivers is a pretty idyllic little spot, and home to many families, artists, and musicians. In short, it has a lot of character. Highway 198 runs right through the middle of it, up to Kings Canyon, a 462,901 acre national park; Lake Kaweah yields three forks of the Kaweah River that give the town its name and splits it up into sections known as "North Fork" and "South Fork". more ›