It occurs to me that I haven't recorded our trip to the Los Angeles basin about a year ago. Let's see if memory serves me, or if it runs screaming into the night, leaving me completely confused.First off, there are a lot of shops down there. They're spread all over. Many close at 5 p.m., and quite a few are closed Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. So if you intend to do anything other than go to dollhouse shops, you probably won't be able to hit all of them. I'm sure we skipped Angels Attic, despite the fabulous reputation of its museum. We stayed in Pasadena, so we started our quest at the Doll House Lady in San Marino. This is your large regional dollhouse store. My memory is that the stock ran pink and Victorian, which is bad news for me but good news for everyone else. I also have wistful memories of a sale table toward the back of the store. If I ever were to live in an adorable Craftsman cottage in Pasadena, I could develop a warm spot in my heart for this store, regardless.The embarrassing lapse of memory is that I cannot recall with any certainty whether we went to My Doll's House in Torrance. It gets excellent reviews elswhere, and I think it might be the one that had the incredibly cool assembled houses upstairs. The photos on their site sure look appealing, so if I were planning a new trip, I'd make sure to go there.Two stores in Orange County do stand out much more clearly. One is inevitably Mott's, partly because they had just moved and it was quite a drama to find the new location. My impression was that their Web site has much more stock than the bricks-and-mortar store. The really outstanding strengths of the store were largely in areas I wasn't buying on that trip: instructional books, lumber and finishes, lighting, and artisanal accessories such as food. That stock was outstanding enough that I felt guilty about not needing it right then!The other extremely memorable venue was the Hobby City complex, which includes a doll museum, a miniatures shop, a railroad-focused hobby store that carries a lot of buildings, a cake-decorating shop that has items that work in half-scale, and a whole bunch of other stores. There is also an amusement park and a restaurant. The dollhouse shop is memorable to me largely for having some half-scale furniture (that's what I was shopping for at the time). If My Doll's House isn't the one with the great stuff upstairs, this one is. By whatever rambling route we were taking, this area is convenient to Mott's, so hitting both makes for an excellent morning.Since we drove home, we hit a few interesting shops on the way north. If you are thinking of visiting Angela's Miniature World in Camarillo, do call first (805 482-2219), as the Web site no longer exists. This store had a huge and tempting selection of mini guy-stuff like tools, tool benches, Egyptian artifacts, and stuff you'd need if you were going to explore the Amazon with Dr. Livingston. It was well beyond my budget, as the really cool artisanal pieces so often are.My favorite store of this trip was Larrianne's Small Wonders. Although the Web site promotes artisanal pieces (gorgeous, aren't they?), the store also had a huge stock of half-scale roomsets, which were my obsession at the time. I remember a lot of dollhouses, some quite unusual... but I was so excited about all the half-scale that I don't remember much about the 1:12 furniture selection.The major disappointment of the trip was discovering that Small Fantasies in Lompoc had not been able to generate enough traffic to survive. If you're in that neck of the woods, it's worth a stop in Solvang just to browse the hundreds of quaint gift stores for finds. It was in one such store that I got the hen-and-chicks egg-serving set in 1:12.And, of course, we always stop at the Miniature Cottage Shop in Morro Bay. This shop is unique in carrying its own building kits in half-scale, as well as a decent amount of half-scale stock (hint, hint: furnish your Fairfield). This is a quirky shop -- you don't go for the size of the selection so much as for curiosity about what you might find.The Los Angeles trip is unusual in that I don't think I even tried to go to fabric, craft, or bead stores. We were distracted by oddities such as an entire outdoor museum devoted to military vehicles. But don't all those goodies on the stores' Web sites just make you want to go?