California

The coast road is California's defining drive, and it changes completely along its length. The famous stretch is Big Sur, where the highway is cut into cliffs above the Pacific for around 150 kilometres between San Simeon and Carmel, with almost no services and a succession of pull-outs that each look like a screensaver. North of San Francisco the coast turns wilder and colder — Point Reyes, the Sonoma and Mendocino shorelines, and eventually the redwood coast — with fog a regular feature even in summer. South of Big Sur the road drops into the softer, warmer, far busier beaches of the Central Coast and Southern California. Two practical points matter more than any list of stops. First, Highway 1 closes: landslides and storm damage shut sections of Big Sur regularly, sometimes for months, and the detour inland is long, so check the current status before committing to the route. Second, drive it north to south if you can — you will be on the ocean side of the road, which is where the pull-outs are — and plan fewer stops over longer blocks, because the road is slow by design and rushing it wastes the point of it.

Nine national parks sit inside the state and they demand different things. Yosemite is the headline: a glacial valley walled by granite, with the waterfalls at their most powerful in late spring as the snowpack melts and the high country opening only in summer once Tioga Road clears. It is also the most crowded, and reservations for entry have applied in peak periods in recent years — check the current requirement rather than assume. Sequoia and Kings Canyon, next door, hold the largest trees on earth and far fewer people. Death Valley is the extreme: the lowest, driest and hottest place in North America, spectacular from late autumn to early spring and genuinely dangerous in high summer. Joshua Tree, closer to Los Angeles, is boulder country and one of the best places in the state for stargazing. Channel Islands requires a boat and rewards the effort with an almost visitor-free coastline. And in the far north, Redwood is the one people skip and should not — the tallest trees on the planet, in coastal fog forest. Route any multi-park trip by temperature and driving time, not by fame.

The Sierra runs most of the state's eastern length and gives California its mountains: Tahoe, a very large and very deep alpine lake straddling the Nevada line, is the year-round centre. In summer it is a swimming, boating and hiking destination with the water clear enough to see the bottom well offshore; in winter it is the biggest concentration of ski resorts in the United States outside Colorado. Both seasons have their friction. Summer weekends bottleneck badly on the lake-access roads and parking fills early. Winter storms close mountain passes and bring chain-control requirements that are enforced, which means a winter trip needs either the right tyres or a flexible plan. Beyond Tahoe, the eastern side of the range along Highway 395 is one of the great overlooked drives in America — Mono Lake's tufa towers, the ghost town at Bodie, the trailheads for the highest peaks in the lower states, and the Owens Valley running south with the mountains rising three thousand metres straight out of it.

California's wine regions differ more than their reputation suggests. Napa is the most developed and the most expensive, with tasting appointments now the norm rather than the exception and a distinct sense of occasion. Sonoma, next door, is looser, more agricultural and generally cheaper, with a wider range of styles across a much larger area. The Central Coast — Paso Robles, the Santa Ynez Valley behind Santa Barbara, the Santa Lucia Highlands — is where the pressure drops away entirely, and it fits naturally into a Highway 1 road trip. Further north, Mendocino and Anderson Valley do cool-climate wines with almost no crowds. Book tastings ahead almost everywhere, particularly at weekends. Beyond wine, the state's food story is agricultural: the Central Valley grows an extraordinary share of America's produce, which is why farmers' markets here are exceptional even by international standards, and why the farm-to-table idea started in this state rather than anywhere else.

San Diego is the easiest big California city to enjoy and the one visitors most often underrate. Balboa Park is the anchor — a very large urban park holding more than a dozen museums, Spanish Colonial Revival architecture from the 1915 exposition, gardens and the zoo, which is among the best in the world and pairs with a larger safari park inland. The beaches run north from the city in a chain of distinct towns: Coronado's broad sand across the bay, La Jolla's coves and sea caves with seals hauled out on the rocks, then Del Mar, Encinitas and Carlsbad up the coast. The old quarter and the Gaslamp district hold the nightlife, and the harbour holds a serious naval and maritime presence. The Mexican border is twenty minutes away and shapes the city's food profoundly — the fish taco as Californians know it came north through here, and the Mexican cooking in the city and in the border communities is the real thing rather than the export version. The climate is the most equable in the state, which is the other reason people keep moving here.

San Francisco and Los Angeles are genuinely different propositions rather than two versions of the same city. San Francisco is small, hilly, cold in summer and walkable in clusters, with the best public transport in the state and a compactness that suits two or three days before you move on — it is covered in the San Francisco city guide. Los Angeles is the opposite: enormous, warm, organised by district rather than centre, and rewarding a longer stay planned zone by zone, as the Los Angeles city guide sets out. For state-trip planning the useful points are these. The two are far enough apart that flying between them makes more sense than driving unless the coast road is itself the plan. Each is the natural gateway to a different half of the state — San Francisco for wine country, the northern coast and Yosemite's western approach; Los Angeles for the deserts, the southern beaches and San Diego. And a trip that tries to include both cities and three parks in ten days will mostly be a driving holiday.

Three practical realities shape any California trip. The first is distance: this is a very large state, and the drives are longer than the map suggests — allow a full day for the coast road between the two big cities, most of a day from Los Angeles to Yosemite, and treat any two-park day as optimistic. The second is that outside San Francisco and central Los Angeles you need a car; public transport between regions is thin, and the Amtrak coastal service is scenic rather than practical. The third is climate, which splits sharply. The coast stays cool year-round, and San Francisco in particular rarely gets warm — 24°C is a hot day there, and summer afternoons are frequently colder than spring ones. The inland valleys and deserts run to 38°C and well beyond through the summer, and the mountains hold snow into early summer at altitude. Spring and autumn are the best compromise almost everywhere. California is also expensive by American standards, with coastal accommodation the main cost — inland and shoulder-season travel makes a substantial difference.