California dreamin'

It is true when they say that California has it all, it does! Mountains, great glacier lakes, deserts, beaches, famous cities, sea cliffs, deep forests, giant trees, wildlife, science, culture, art, famous tech industry, Hollywood, Hippies, even some very interesting history. Most tourists visit the big cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, the beaches and perhaps one or two of the famous parks like Yosemite or Death Valley, but there is so much to this place, that is is nearly impossible to describe California in a simple article. Yet, I will try to convey some of my impressions of the many trips I made to this pretty state.

Majority of my travels to CA have been work related and thus took me to the San Francisco Bay Area (short Bay Area) due to my links to Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There have also been many conferences and summer schools that took place in other places including Monterey/Pacific Grove and Los Angeles. I am also fortunate to have many friends who live in CA that have shown me around many wonderful places like Big Sur, Mill Valley, San Diego, Berkeley, Oakland, Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc. It was much later when we lived in New Mexico for over two years when we finally visited the rest of the state, in particular, its countless nature parks.

The Golden Gate bridge, Sausalito, CA.

Nature aside, some of the most interesting things about California are its subcultures, various Hippies, surfers, techies, movie industry mobs and wannabes, the super rich, the super poor, environmentalists, pulsing gay communities, body builders, etc. It is a true ZOO of the humans and exploring all those different groups of people can be very rewarding. I had a lot of fun going to trendy clubs around Hollywood Blvd. or chilling on Venice Beach in LA, Castro street, the Mission district or hanging out in cafes around Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, overhearing conversations of techies about their startups in cafes in Palo Alto, visiting student bars and/or fraternity houses in Berkeley, etc. Each place had a very specific and totally different atmosphere. They do take people-watching to the next level. I always found that most of the people in California were very laid back, liberal thinkers with a very positive attitude and I always had a lot of fun hanging out with them having interesting conversations about the environment, politics, culture or even the outdoors. I also met a lot of weirdos that must have come from another planet, mostly in LA!

Holywood Blvd, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, CA.

My first ever visit to California was to Los Angeles, of all places. It was a summer school at UCLA (University of California in Los Angeles) when I was a first year PhD student. I had a lot of fun, especially since I was there with good friends, but I have to admit that LA is my least favourite place in CA. In fact I quite dislike it. Nevertheless, there is a lot to do and I managed to have fun. My and my old buddy Ian from England came here early and stayed in a hostel directly on Hollywood Blvd., we partied, we toured the place, visited the beach, went on one of those silly tours of the stars houses in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, we even visited the Universal Studios.  I walked along the beach from Santa Monica to Venice beach, saw all the smoke shops, the Baywatch!, the Muscle beach, even had a weirdo following me half the time, well it all looked just like in the movies. LA is a pretty mad place, we were crazy enough to get on a bus in this city and for the first time met an odd guy wearing a tin foil hat. Yes, indeed, LA is full of mostly crazy people! But that was part of the fun! One of the best things we did in LA was watching the extended version of the Watchmen in the Chinese Theater, I never thought that cinema could be so good, the sound, the image, just amazing! We also spent two days in San Diego, which mostly famous for the Sea World and the ZOO, and it was much more chilled out place. We stayed in a hippie/surfer hostel on Ocean Beach, which was fantastic, Ian also went diving in La Joya. In SD we finally met the hippies and surfers we expected to meet in LA. We even saw the "old Spanish town", which was actually really bad, pretty fake. It was in this area when I tasted my first ever good Mexican food and it was heaven! I took a Grehound bus back to LA before my flight back to England that got me to the bus station, right by the infamous Skid Row after midnight, well that was a bit scary!

Los Angeles beaches.

Universal Studios, Los Angeles, CA.

San Diego, CA.

My following visits were all to the Bay Area and Monterey, which I grew to like very much.  San Francisco is simply a beautiful city, full of culture, creative atmosphere, interesting and very liberal people. In general this city know how to live and has a very good vibe. I really love the Victorian architecture with its specific style so iconic for this city. It also has very interesting history dating back to the gold rush times, but more important as a birth place of many human rights, equality, youth and gay movements. This culture of protest, active political discussion, social changes and acceptance of minorities, womens' rights, gay rights, and liberation of the youth culture is still very visible in the city. There is also a sizable asian population as San Francisco has been the main point of entry for majority of the immigrants from the Far East. This also means that local Japanese, Chinese and Korean food is probably the best in the country! San Francisco has one of the best China Towns in the US and it is well worth it to stroll around, check out all those wonderful shops and grab something tasty for lunch or snack. One of the coolest things about the city are the countless historical trams and trolley buses that have been brought here from various part of the world.

The Golden Gate bridge, San Francisco, CA.

On a ferry to Sausalito, CA.

San Francisco, CA.

Iconic San Francisco architecture.

Murals at Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, CA.

The food in general was extremely good in the area. I had some of the best Korean (and other Asian) food in the Bay, but there are countless delicious bakeries, cafes and various ethnic restaurants all over the area. I especially enjoyed the sea food. One of my favourite tours was taking the historic tram to the Fisherman's Wharf and from there the ferry to Sausalito, then walking back across the Golden Gate Bridge. One can then take multiple buses back to the city from the other side of the bridge. When at the Fisherman's Wharf one should not miss the Pier 39 and its famous inhabitants, sea lions that moved here after an earthquake a few years ago. There are also plentiful restaurants serving delicious sea food making it a perfect lunch spot. The Alcatraz tour is also well worth it. The downtown San Francico is not terribly exciting, just lots of shops and some tall buildings. The real fun happens around the Mission District, which is a home to many bars, restaurants and alternative culture, the Castro Street famous for the gay community, which is where Harvey Milk lived and started is equality campaign, and Haight-Ashbury the original home to the Hippie movement. I have been in San Francisco during the Pride Parade time, which was both amazing and insane experience and I would recommend it. A very cool place to visit also the farmers market at the Ferry Building by the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge. I should also warn future visitors, that this is not the sunny warm California, SF is in one of the many microclimates and it is rather cold and foggy, bring a jacket!

Sea lions at Pier 39, San Francisco, CA.

Alcatraz, San Francisco, CA.

San Francisco Pride

Protesters at the city hall, San Francisco, CA.

Most of the touring I did with my friends which were based at various locations around including San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Santa Cruz, or Mountain View. I also had the chance to visit the Google headquarters in the Silicon Valley since several of my friends from Oxford now work there and I can confirm it is true what they say, the food there is amazing and free! Google is basically a nerdy adult playground and it is a super fun place to visit. They have inflatable castles the nerds can go and jump around, bikes you can take around the campus that are obviously coded in the prime Google colours, they have the Android statue exhibition, nerdy shop, sports grounds, a dinosaur sceleton, a rocket car, you name it! The entire Silicon Valley is covered with tech companies, big and small ones, startups, just driving through Montain View you pass by signs with famous names like Apple, Facebook, eBay, etc. They even have one of the NASA research centers, where one of my friends also works. This part of CA has without a question highest concentration of computer nerds in the USA.

Google, Mountain View, CA.

I did a lot of my research at Livermore and Stanford. The Stanford University does have one of the most amazing campuses in the US and I really enjoyed just hanging out there, going around the museums and shops they had available there. Palo Alto itself is not the most exciting place, but it has some good places to eat. Another cool university campus was UC Berkeley, which I visited on one of my research trips and was lucky that a friend of mine also happened to be there on a PhD programme in Astrophysics. I stayed in one of the university dorms that weekend. He took me around the campus as well as the hippie town that surrounds it. Berkeley has a very youthful and rebellious culture. This is a very liberal and progressive university, it is also a world class institution and with it comes a very refreshing intellectual environment. It was here, where I also saw the vile fraternity houses for the first time. The most exciting thing there were the multiple parking spaces reserved to Nobel Laureates. 

Berkeley, CA.

Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

A very good old friend of mine was working on her thesis in marine ecology in Monterey and she was very kind to invite me to see her on one of my research trips in Livermore. So I made use of the excellent public transport system in the Bay Area and hopped on the BART and Caltrain and went down to Gilroy to meet her. She took me visit a friend in Santa Cruz, which I found to be a quirky hippie town on the coast across the bay from Monterey. This place is full love lovely vegan restaurants and delicious coffee shops. There is also a rather tacky beach board walk that did not fit so well with the feel of the rest of the town. My friend took me on a free pass to the Monterey Aquarium where she also worked. This is indeed probably one of the best aquaria in the world. It is dedicated to the conservation of the rich habitat of the Monterey Bay, mainly sea mammals and namely sea otters which are also among the inhabitants of the aquarium. The irony is that the premises of the aquarium are the original Hovden Cannery that once was the cause of the near extinction of many species in this area. I came back a year or so later on a conference which was held at Pacific Grove, another absolutely stunning ocean front town adjacent to Monterey. This time I had two local friends in Monterey whom I met up with and we drove to the Big Sur to have a dinner at one of the most scenic restaurants in California, Nepethe. The food, local wine and the view were all extremely delicious. It was then I completely fell in love with Big Sur and the scenic Hwy 1. During the conference I went on many walks around the cliffs, beaches and forests in this area. There is a lot of wildlife and the place has the most wonderful calming effect. The slightly strange thing about this area and in fact the whole coast are the microclimates. Monterey and Pacific Grove are cold and covered in a thick fog most of the time, while Santa Cruz is actually very warm beach resort, they are only about 40 minutes drive from one another.

Pacific Grove, CA.

Nepethe, Big Sur, CA.

Monterey, CA.

Monterey Bay Aquarium, Monterey, CA.

Santa Cruz, CA.

Old Spanish Mission in Carmel, CA.

More recently we finally decided that it is time to do a real road trip and visit all the places in California that I missed on my many city breaks. It was time to finally see the natural treasures of this stunning state. So we packed ourselves and went on a two and half weeks long road trip from Santa Fe, NM across Arizona and Nevada to California. Our objective was to mostly visit the national parks and monuments, nature preserves and state parks. We also wanted to visit some of our friends, mostly around the Bay Area, so we plotted a slightly ambitious, but very encompassing trajectory around CA. First we had to cross a rather long distance across NM and AZ which we drove in about 8 hours all the way to Las Vegas which was our first proper stop. On the way we also visited the industrial marvel of the US, the Hoover Dam. Although none of these are in California they deserve to be mentioned in this blog. Hoover Dam is a superb technological marvel which we could not miss since we are fascinated by industrial  history and civil engineering. This dam harbours water from the Colorado river and is tasked with the difficult and possibly futile duty of water management for this overpopulated desert. Las Vegas!!! Well, this place is just crazy, its nickname "adult Disneyland" is very fitting indeed. Everything about this place is artificial and build for the sole purpose of entertainment. This tradition goes back to the old West when this place became the playground for Californians. In Nevada, gambling and strip clubs are legal, even prostitution is legal in some counties, although those brothels are not exactly glamorous. We travelled there with the baby and decided to spend out half a day and evening in the city. We stayed in a motel just of the Strip with convenient walking distance to the casinos. We did not gamble, so we decided to enjoy the city as casual visitors/observers. We headed for a huge dinner at the Wynn casino buffet, which is said to be the best one in town and is famous for its crab leg special and I can confirm that they were amazing. There was the most amazing selection of all kinds of food and dessert and it was all so unbelievably tasty. Our baby daughter had a cuteness outburst, so we even had our drinks free there! Then we walked down the Strip and man it was hot!, so picked up margaritas to go. We stopped by the famous casinos, all the silly shapes, fake Eiffel tower, Venice or the Egyptian Pyramids. The streets were full of girls wearing revealing carnival outfits charging for photos taken with them, we kept on being invited to visit strip clubs despite carrying a 6 months old baby in a backpack. It all was ridiculous. In the evening we took the monorail back to our hotel and decided that this was fun and we will probably never come back :D

Las Vegas, NV.

The Hoover Dam, NV,AZ.

After Vegas we started our nature exploration. It was July and we decided it was a great idea to drive to the Death Valley. Well, there is a good reason for this name. Parts of this national park are below the sea level and summer temperatures regularly reach above 120 degrees F (48 degrees Celsius)! Americans mostly visit this park in the winter when the temperatures are more bearable, but the Europeans are crazy enough to go there in the summer and so did we. We could never stay out of the air-conditioned car for more than 10 minutes, even eating ice cream in a shade and breeze was just as pleasant as being roasted in hell. Even in the evening the temperatures would not drop, that when were getting desperate. But the scenery was just stunning, this is a truly beautiful place and it is well worth visiting and hiking in the winter. There is also an Indian settlement, some industrial history, old mines, Scotty's Castle and other bizare things there. We stayed in one of the lodges right in the park by the Paramint Springs, which also had a nice little restaurant and delicious prickly pear Margaritas that made my day.

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park, CA.

Bad Water Basin, Death Valley National Park, CA.

Devils Golfcourse, Death Valley National Park, CA.

Death Valley National Park, CA.

Death Valley National Park, CA.

Death Valley National Park, CA.

The next day we continued towards the Sierra Nevadas heading towards Mammoth Lakes. The first sight of the Mt. Whitney ridge was spectacular. These mountains are enormous and wonderfully majestic. They must have also been extremely bad news for the first settlers trying to make it to the California coast during the gold rush times, especially after crossing the deserts with almost all supplies gone. On the way we stopped by the Convict Lake, which got its name based on a proper Wild West story of escaped convicts and sheriffs getting into a shooting battle. Then we continued to our destination of the day a cute ski town of Mammoth Lakes. There we visited the Devils Postpile National Monument and did a little hike to the Rainbow Falls, which was so beautiful. This was our first taste of the Sierra Nevada nature.

Convict Lake, Sierra Nevada, CA.

Devils Postpile NM, Rainbow Falls, Mammoth Lakes, CA.

Then we continued towards Yosemite, where we hiked up to the Gaylor lakes on the eastern end of the Tioga road. This was a steep, but wonderful hike in a less busy part of the park and it offers some of the best views in Yosemite. This is a very popular park and it gets very crowded in the summer, so we were happy to see that there are spots like this where you can be alone undisturbed in this untouched nature. We continued along the Tioga road, stopping at overlooks and we spent the lunch break by the Tanaya Lake, which is one of the most picturesque spots in the park. There are numerous beaches for swimming and trails for hiking around this lake. In the afternoon we headed towards the Glacier points to get the famous views. In the morning we went to the Yosemite Valley, which is beautiful, but got crowded very quickly. We visited a few waterfalls and walked around a little, but cut the visit short to avoid the crowds and headed back up to the more relaxed Tioga part of the park. Yosemite is a stunning park and absolutely deserves its world class reputation. This park as well as the Kings Canyon and the Desolation Wilderness near Lake Tahoe and the best spots for backpacking in the high Sierra Nevada.

Tioga Pass, Yosemite National Park, CA.

Tanaya Lake, Yosemite National Park, CA.

Gaylor Lakes hike, Yosemite National Park, CA.

Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, CA.

Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, CA.

After Yosemite we we crossed back East and visited the famous Bodie ghost town, which is one of the best preserved gold rush era mining towns in the USA. We went there at the end of the day when it was not very crowded and had very good time exploring the Wild West. We then stopped by Mono Lake and visited the Tufa State park. This is a salt lake with no outlet and has some of the most beautiful rock formations, the Tufa towers, which are limestone deposits from underwater springs. We stayed in a super cool hippie motel, El Mono hotel, which also has a wonderful coffee shot that makes the best organic sandwiches! This place comes very highly recommended if you look for accommodation on this end of the Sierras.

Bodie ghost town, CA.

Tufa State Park, Mono Lake, CA.

Tufa State Park, Mono Lake, CA.

Then we continued north towards Lake Tahoe. There we took two very relaxed days. We stayed in South Lake Tahoe. We hiked down to the Emerald Bay and visited the Vikingsholm mansion which was a bizarre romanticized version of a Scandinavian castle. Then we hiked up to Eagle Lake and part of the way towards the Desolation Wilderness above the lake. This was a super picturesque hike with the best views, lakes, forests, mountains and waterfalls, just amazing! The rest of the time we took it easy on the Pope beach and went swimming in Lake Tahoe. The following day we beat the July 4th crowds and relocated towards Napa Valley, where we met up with our friends from the Bay Area. We had booked a picnic table in the famous Rutherford Hill Winery near Saint Helena, which offered some of the best views of the valley. We ate cheese, delicious chicken salad, fruits and drank wine pretty much the whole day and it was wonderful. In the evening we drove to San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. We stayed with our friends on the western side of San Fran in the deep deep fog near the Ocean Beach. We had a lovely BBQ with friends, some good dinners, took breakfast in the super delicious Devil's Teeth Bakery, toured the city a little, had lunch at Fisherman's Wharf and went on the Alcatraz tour. This was a super relaxing and fun part of the trip. It was especially amazing catch up with lots of good friends that all happened to be in the Bay Area at the time. 

Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, CA.

Eagle Lake hike, Lake Tahoe, CA.

Napa Valley, CA.

The Golden Gate bridge, San Francisco, CA.

Two days later, we stopped for a breakfast at Google with some friends and continued south towards Monterey. On the way we stopped by the Big Basin State Park to take a look at the Red Woods and had lunch in Santa Cruz. In the afternoon we visited the Monterey Aquarium. The next day we headed south and stopped by the little pretty town Carmel and the Big Sur. Then we drove down along the Highway 1, the Pacific coast scenit route. This road should not be missed on any California road trip. It has been nominated one of the top 10 scenic drives in the world by the National Geographic and there is a very good reason for it. We made several stops to take a look at various cliff sceneries and even seen some sea lions sunbathing on a beach. We passed through many microclimates, some completely covered in fog, others super sunny with hidden beaches and surfers. In the afternoon we finally arrived in Santa Barbara, explored the town a little and stayed at a small beach resort hotel south of the city. Next morning we had our only time on the beach for a few hours and then we started driving east towards the Sierras again.

Big Basin State Park, CA. 

Hwy 1, CA.

Hwy 1, CA.

Hwy 1, CA.

Hwy 1, CA.

Hwy 1, CA.

Hwy 1, CA.

Santa Barbara, CA.

Santa Barbara, CA.

The next two days we spent visiting the Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. This part of the trip was a true highlight for me. Since I was a kid I dreamed to see these wonderful giant trees and now, my dream was gonna come true. We had only very limited time here and there is simply so much to do. But we managed to do some nice little hikes, explored different parts of both parks and had time to take in the feeling of looking up these majestic trees. After that we started heading back home stopping by the Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave Preservation Area. We did some little hikes and had stopped on several overlooks. This is a very different type of desert than we are used to in New Mexico, the entire ecosystem is also very different. All those Joshua trees and strange cacti were extremely amusing. It was amazing to see those oases with real palm trees and unusual rock formations. These parks are best enjoyed with 4x4 off-road vehicle that can take you on some of the more remote trails as it is often too hot and far for any proper hiking or backpacking. We stayed in the Harmony Motel in Twentynine Palms, which is famous for U2 the band that stayed there on one of their US tours.

Kings Canyon NP, CA. 

Sequoia NP, CA. 

Sequoia NP, CA.

Joshua Tree NP, CA.

Harmony Motel (U2 stayed here!), Twentynine Palms, CA.

Mojave Preservation Area, CA.

California remains to be one of my favourite places to visit. We still have the entire north to explore. In the future, I hope to visit the Lassen Volcanic NP, Whiskeytown, Redwood NP, Lava Beds NM and the glass beach at Fort Bragg. So keep tuned in, this blog article will expand in the future!