Worth the Drive: Bracken Fern Manor

Worth the Drive is NBCLA's twice weekly look at nearby getaways

Your job: Decide to get out of town and fast. Our job: Help you find where you're headed. This week, NBCLA's Worth the Drive takes us to...

Bracken Fern Manor: It has a name, and a look, straight from a moor-swept novel. It has a bootleggin' past, complete with subterranean tunnel (the better to run all that hooch). And inside? Cozy. Very.

Location: Lake Arrowhead

Bugsy Siegel: Mr. Siegel, ever the entrepreneur, wanted to turn the Arrowhead area into a bustling gamblers' playground back in the '20s; picture Las Vegas in a sweater. The Bracken Fern was one of his spirits-soaked niteries.

How'd the casino thing work out? Lake Arrowhead's main thoroughfare -- the village's "Strip" if you prefer -- is likely to see more honking geese than honking taxis.

Do we adore that? We do. So do the locals, and the people who return for Lake Arrowhead's famous Oktoberfest every year.

Oktoberfest: It opens, in 2009, on September 26th, and oompahs each weekend through November 1st. Chicken dance!

When you're oompahed out: Best tuck into a bed up on the mountain, at the atmosphere-rich Bracken Fern, where rooms start at $110 a night, or one of the resorts found near the village.

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