|
|
||||
California 
{State Bird, California Valley Quail} {State Flower, Golden Poppy} {State Tree, California Red Wood}
Famous
for the: Giant Red Wood Trees, Beautiful Ocean Beaches, Mountains.
Economy:
transportation equipment, printing, metals, electronic, electrical,
fruits,
vegetables, wines, cotton, cattle, oil, minerals.
AT Burbank & Hollywood you can see where movies are made: NBC, Paramount Studios, Warner Bros Studios, Universal Studios, each offers tours.
California,
means sunshine and palm trees to most of us. But California also has the
highest mountains in the continental United States, the high sierras offer
skiing snow boarding and great fishing for lake trout, Ghost towns from
the 49 gold days, Some of the most beautiful ocean beaches in the world,
amusement parks almost any thing you can think of from: Mt. Whitney over
14,000 ft to Death Valley more than -250 ft.
climates
in the sierras can go below zero or southern California can stay warm year
around, the deserts can be more than 110 degrees f.
Hollywood
has the most plush restaurants in the world and tours of stars homes.
Bakersfield
the country music capital of the west, where you can hear the stars play.
LA
and Sanfransico have so much to offer I cant begin to write it all here.
You
can even take a gold pan and still find gold in California.
San Diego Zoo,San Diego As humane and "natural" a zoo as you'll find anywhere, with a vast collection of rare species.
Mono Lake The blue waters of remote Mono Lake are prime bird-watching territory; it's also a spectacle in its own right.
Joshua
Tree National Park The eerie "arms" of Joshua trees beckon visitors
to explore this long-abandoned mining country.
Highway 1 Thrilling drive along the US's west coast, with pounding Pacific surf as far as the eye can see.
Yosemite National Park Giant sequoias, towering waterfalls, the sheer face of Half Dome - your eyes will hardly get a rest.
Click here for Calico Ghost Town
California is too large to be fully explored in a single trip, but in an area so varied it's hard to pick out specific highlights. Los Angeles is far and away the biggest and most stimulating city: a maddening collection of freeways, beaches, seedy suburbs, upscale neighborhoods and extreme lifestyles. From Los Angeles you can head south to the growing metropolis of San Diego , with its broad, welcoming beaches and easy access to Mexico; or push inland to the desert areas , most notably Death Valley , a barren and inhospitable landscape of volcanic craters and salt pans that in summer becomes the hottest place on earth.
Click here to See Death Valley
Most people, though, follow the shoreline north up the central coast : a gorgeous run that takes in lively small towns like Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz . California's second city, San Francisco , at the top end, is about as different from LA as it's possible to get: the oldest, most European-styled city in the state, set on a series of steep hills, its wooden houses tumbling down to water on three sides. It is also well placed for the national parks to the east, such as Yosemite , where waterfalls cascade into a sheer glacial valley, and Sequoia/Kings Canyon with its gigantic trees, as well as the ghost towns of the Gold Country. North of San Francisco the countryside becomes wilder, wetter and greener, approaching Oregon through spectacular and almost deserted volcanic tablelands.
The climate in southern California consists of seemingly endless days of sunshine and warm dry nights, with occasional bouts of torrential flooding in the winter. LA's notorious smog is at its worst when the temperatures are highest, from July through September. All along the coast mornings can be hazily overcast, especially in May and June; in exposed San Francisco it can be chilly all year, and fog rolls in to ruin many a sunny day. Much more so than in the south, winter in northern California can bring rain for weeks on end, causing massive mudslides that wipe out roads and hillside homes. Most hiking trails in the mountains are blocked between October and June by the snow that keeps California's ski slopes among the busiest in the nation.
The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELES sprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world.
LA is a young city; in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a community of white American immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than fifty thousand. Only on completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s did it really begin to grow, as a national mecca for good health, clean living, plentiful sunshine and endless acres of citrus crops. The biggest group of transplants were refugees from the Midwest, who created a new political ruling class to replace the old Mexican elite. The old ranchos were soon subdivided, the population grew rapidly, and the enduring symbol of the city became the family-sized suburban house (with swimming pool and two-car garage). The biggest boom came after World War II with the mushrooming of the aeronautics industry - which, until post-Cold War military cutbacks, accounted for one in four jobs.
The first-time visitor may well find Los Angeles thrilling and threatening in equal proportions; it's a place that picks you up and sweeps you along whether you want it to or not. While it has its fine-art museums, California cuisine and a few old-fashioned urban plazas, what people really come here for is to experience the city that has come to epitomize the American Dream - the fantasy worlds of Disneyland and Hollywood , as well as the gilded opulence of Beverly Hills and Malibu
SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies just 48 hilly square miles at the tip of a slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California coast. Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the US, it remains true to itself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small city whose people pride themselves on being the cultured counterparts to their cousins in LA - the last bastion of civilization on the lunatic fringe of America. It's a compact and approachable place, where downtown streets rise on impossible gradients to reveal stunning views of the city, the bay and beyond, and blanket fogs roll in unexpectedly to envelop the city in mist. This is not the California of mono-tonous blue skies and slothful warmth - the temperatures rarely exceed the seventies, and even during summer can drop much lower.
The original inhabitants of this area, the Ohlone Indians , were all but wiped out within a few years of the establishment in 1776 of the Mission Dolores , the sixth in the chain of Spanish Catholic missions that ran the length of California. Two years after the Americans replaced the Mexicans in 1846, the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills precipitated the rip-roaring Gold Rush . Within a year fifty thousand pioneers had traveled west, and east from China, turning San Francisco from a muddy village and wasteland of sand dunes into a thriving supply center and transit town. By the time the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, San Francisco was a lawless, rowdy boomtown of bordellos and drinking dens, something the moneyed elite - who hit it big on the much more dependable silver Comstock Load - worked hard to mend, constructing wide boulevards, parks, a cable car system and elaborate Victorian redwood mansions.
In the midst of the city's golden age, however, a massive earthquake , followed by three days of fire, wiped out most of the town in 1906. Rebuilding began immediately, resulting in a city more magnificent than before; in the decades that followed, writers like Dashiell Hammett and Jack London lived and worked here. Many of the city's landmarks, including Coit Tower and both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, were built in the 1920s and 1930s. By World War II San Francisco had been eclipsed by Los Angeles as the main west coast city, but it achieved a new cultural eminence with the emergence of the Beats in the Fifties and the hippies in the Sixties, when the fusion of music, protest, rebellion and, of course, drugs that characterized 1967's "Summer of Love" took over the Haight-Ashbury district.
In a conservative America, San Francisco's reputation as a liberal oasis continues to grow, attracting waves of resettlers from all over the US. It is estimated that over half the city's population originates from somewhere else. It is a city in a constant state of evolution, fast gentrifying itself into one of the most high-end towns on earth - thanks, in part, to the disposable incomes pumped into its coffers from its sizeable singles and gay contingents. Gay capital of the world, San Francisco has also been the scene of the dot.com revolution's rise and fall. The resultant wealth at one time made housing prices skyrocket - often at the expense of the city's middle and lower classes - but the closure of hundreds of start-up IT companies has brought real-estate prices back down to (almost) reasonable levels. Despite the city's current economic ebbs and flows, your impression of the city likely won't be altered - it remains one of the most proudly distinct places to be found anywhere
The
City
San
Francisco is a city of hills and distinct neighborhoods. As a general rule,
geographical elevation means wealth - the higher up you are, the less fog
you endure, resulting in better views.
