San Diego County Library Descanso Branch

How can you not love our small town local library? It's convenient, clean, friendly and if they don't have it all you need to do is ask. With a beautiful scenery up here, the only thing missing is a great book!

This is a small gem of a library, tucked away from the through travel routes so that it takes a bit of a detour to visit if you're not a local. Architecturally it's pretty much your standard-issue small rural public library, but when you realize that this 2500 square-foot building replaced a former library about the size of Thoreau's cabin after the community pulled together to help fund it in the 1980s-90s, it becomes more impressive. (The old building was moved to the new library site from its original location and now serves to house the weekly Friends of the Library book sales.) There's a ramada surrounded by a native-plant garden with great views of the Cuyamaca Mountains, there's free wi-fi if you need it, and judging from how busy it was the last time I stayed in Descanso, it's doing a good job of serving its consituents.