About an hour west of Santa Barbara, the town of Lompoc, California has much to offer adventurers visiting the West Coast. Nestled in between a peaceful national forest and the mesmerizing Pacific Ocean, Lompoc offers visitors to southern California the perfect home base. In fact, it is such a wonderful area that the Air Force has made it home to one of their bases. While many of the locals in the area work at the nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base, the city of Lompoc itself has a calm and historic feel to it. As you walk around the town, especially in the historic district, you can get a sense of the Mexican heritage of the town. Even though the town may have been founded as a temperance colony back in 1888 after having been won in the American-Mexican War in 1848, the surrounding vineyards you’ll see now say otherwise about the locals.