California Travel Guide - San Francisco, LA, San Diego & Santa Barbara.

California Tourism and Travel Guide - San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Anaheim and more.

Publicized and idealized all over the World, CALIFORNIA absolutely lives up to all the myths. California is more than just a paradise of sun, sand and surf, it has high mountain ranges, fast paced glitzy cities, primeval old growth forests and vast stretches of deserts. The geography is imbued with history, ranging from rock carvings left by indigenous Native American Indians to the eerie ghost towns of the Gold Rush pioneers.

In some ways, the west coast is the ultimate now society. Anywhere so vulnerable to the constant threat of the Big One - a massive earthquake of unimaginable terror - is bound to have a sense of living for the moment. However, its supposed superficiality is largely fictitious. Although home to such reactionary figures as Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, it has also been the source of some of the country's most progressive political factions . The intense protests of the Sixties may have died down, but California remains the heart of liberal America, at the forefront of environmental awareness, gay pride and social permissiveness, and increasingly a bulwark of the Democratic Party. Economically, as well, the region is crucial, whether in the film industry, the music business, the financial markets, or the all-consuming sector of real estate development.

California is too vast to be fully explored in a single trip, but in an area so varied it's hard to pick out specific highlights. Los Angeles California 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.

Most people, however, 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 of Southern California consists of seemingly endless days of sunshine and warm dry nights, with occasional bouts of torrential flooding in the winter. Los Angeles's notorious smog is at its worst when the temperatures are highest, from July through September. Along the coast mornings can be hazy and overcast, especially in May and June; in exposed San Francisco California it can be chilly all year, and fog rolls in to ruin many a pleasant 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.

Los Angeles California
The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA sprawls across a thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by intricate networks of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. The colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools are both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world.

Los Angeles California is a young city: in the mid nineteenth century, it was a community of AngloAmerican immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than sixty 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 LA thrilling and threatening in equal proportions: its 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.

Los Angeles - The City
With only limited space between the desert, the mountains and the ocean, Los Angeles Calofornia has long since filled in the gaps between what were once small and isolated towns. As a result, it's a massive conglomeration of interconnected, amorphous districts, often with little in common.

If Los Angeles has a heart, however, its downtown , in the center of the basin. It offers a taste of almost everything you'll find elsewhere around the city, from upscale avant-garde art along Bunker Hill to the abject dereliction of Skid Row in the Eastside, compressed into an area of small, easily walkable blocks. The area around downtown contains some decaying Victorian suburbs, 1920s Art Deco buildings and the center of LA's enormous and growing Hispanic population.

Heading West from downtown to the coast, the first major district you come to Hollywood, has streets caked with movie legend - even if the genuine glamour is long gone. Adjoining West LA is home to the city's newest money, shown off in Beverly Hills and along the Sunset Strip. Santa Monica and Venice to the west are the quintessential seafront LA of palm trees, white sands and laid-back living, while the coastline itself stretches another twenty miles northwest to glamorous Malibu California, home to the movieland elite.

Suburban Orange County , to the southeast, holds little of interest apart from Disneyland and a handful of laid-back beach towns. On the far side of the northern hills lie the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys or simply the Valley, seen by mainstream Los Angeles as nothing more than depressing tract homes and endless strip malls, not unlike the generic LA stereotype viewed by the rest of America.

Top Los Angeles Area Hotels. Includes LAX Hotels, Downtown Los Angeles Hotels, Hollywood Hotels, Beverly Hills Hotels and Palm Springs Hotels.
Santa Barbara Hotels Santa Barbara Resort Hotels Best Western Beverly Hills Pavilion Best Western Mayfair Hotel Best Western Galleria Best Western Redondo Beach Crowne Plaza Beverly Hills Four Points Sheraton LAX Four Points Sheraton Santa Monica Furama Hotel Furama Hotel Los Angeles Grafton On Sunset The Grafton on Sunset Hilton Checkers Hilton Checkers Los Angeles Hilton LAX Hilton Hotel Los Angeles Airport LAX Hilton Holiday Inn LAX Holiday Inn Los Angeles Holiday Inn Express Universal City Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel Hyatt Hollywood Hyatt Regency Los Angeles Hyatt Los Angeles Le Meridien Hotel Beverly Hills Le Parc Suites Loews Beverly Hills Loews Santa Monica Loews Hotel Santa Monica Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel Millenium Biltmore Hotel Mondrian Hotel Los Angeles New Otani Hotel Radisson Hotel LAX Radisson Wilshire Plaza Hotel Ramada Plaza Hollywood Renaissance Hotel Los Angeles Ritz Milner Hotel Los Angeles Sheraton Gateway Hotel Viceroy Hotel Santa Monica Westin Bonaventure Westin Bonaventure Hotel Westin Bonaventure Los Angeles Park Hyatt Los Angeles Roosevelt Hollywood Hotel Baby Carrier

San Diego California
Relatively free from smog and byzantine freeways, SAN DIEGO CALIFORNIA is set around a graceful curved bay, representing the acceptable face of southern California. The second biggest city in California may be affluent and conservative, but it's also easygoing and far from smug. Though it was the site of the first mission in California, the city only really took off with the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in the 1880s, and in terms of trade and significance it has long been in the shadow of Los Angeles. However, during World War II the US Navy made San Diego its Pacific Command Center, and the military continues to dominate the local economy, along with tourism.

The City of San Diego California
With a mix of laid back libertarians and military minded conservatives (drawn from the adjacent naval base), San Diego California embodies both work hard and play hard lifestyles. With an easily navigable central area, beautiful bay, 43 miles of beaches and plentiful parks, theme parks and museums, San Diego California is hard not to love from the moment you arrive.

San Francisco California
The City of SAN FRANCISCO occupies just 49 square miles of rolling hills at the tip of a slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California Coast. Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in America, it remains true to itself: a funky, individualistic and surprisingly small city whose people pride themselves on being the cultured counterparts to their cousins in Los Angeles California. The last mainstay of civilization on the lunatic fringe of America. San Francisco is a compact and approachable place, where downtown roads rise on ridiculous gradients to reveal stunning views of the skyline, the San Francisco Bay and beyond, and blanket fogs roll in unexpectedly to envelop the city in mist. This is not the California of monotonous blue skies and slothful warmth - the temperatures rarely exceed the seventies, and even during summer can drop much lower.

The original inhabitants of this Northern California region, 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 the State of California. Two years after the Americans replaced the Mexicans in 1846, the discovery of gold in the Sierra Mountain foothills precipitated the rip roaring Gold Rush. Within Months fifty thousand pioneers had traveled west, and east from China, transforming 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 California was a lawless, rowdy boomtown of bordellos and drinking bars, something the rich elite who hit it big on the much more dependable silver Comstock Load worked hard to mend, constructing wide blvds., parks, cable car systems and elaborate Victorian redwood mansions.

In the midst of San Francisco's golden age a massive earthquake , followed by three days of fire, wiped out most of the city 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 blend 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 California offers a reputation as a liberal sanctuary that continues to grow and attracts waves of settlers from all over America. It's estimated that over half of the population of San Francisco originates from someplace 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 California has also been the scene of the dot.com revolutions 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 current economic ebbs of San Francisco and flows, your impression of the city likely will not be altered. San Francisco remains one of the most proudly distinct places to be found anywhere on the planet.

San Francisco - The City
San Francisco California is a city of hills and distinct neighborhoods. As a basic rule, geographical elevation means wealth, the higher up you are, the less fog you endure, resulting in better views. Commercial square footage is confined mostly to the downtown area, and the rest of San Francisco is made up of mostly residential neighborhoods with street level shopping districts, easily explored by foot. Armed with a great map and strong legs, you could plough through much of the city in a day, but the best way to get to know San Francisco is to dawdle.

Santa Barbara California
The six lane coastal freeway that races past oil wells and offshore drilling platforms slows to a leisurely pace a hundred miles north of Los Angeles at SANTA BARBARA CALIFORNIA. Beautiful gently sloping hills above the Pacific Ocean, Santa Barbara's ubiquitous red tiled roofs and white stucco walls of its low rise buildings form a backdrop to some fine Spanish Revival architecture, while the beaches are wide, clean, beautiful and are lined by palm trees along a curving Bay. Although most of downtown has been replaced by a vast, upscale shopping mall, Santa Barbara California has managed to retain its quaintly upscale yet relaxed character.

The mission era feel of Santa Barbara is no accident. Following a devastating earthquake in 1925, Santa Barbara was completely rebuilt in the image of an apocryphal Spanish Colonial past, with numerous arcades linking shops, caf�s and restaurants, and a pedestrian-friendly layout that serves visitors well, a far cry from LA's all-consuming auto-worship. State Street , the main drag, is home to an appealing assortment of diners, bookshops, coffee bars and nightclubs. The few remaining genuine mission structures are preserved as El Presidio de Santa Barbara daily 10.30am-4.30pm; suggested donation. At its center, the 200-year-old barracks, El Cuartel, stands two blocks off State Street on Perdido Street; the second-oldest building in California, it now houses historical exhibits and a scale model of the small Spanish colony. The more recent past is recounted in the nearby Santa Barbara Historical Museum , 136 E de la Guerra St Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; suggested donation, full of Spanish and Victorian memorabilia.

State Street leads half a mile down from the town center to wooden Stearns Wharf . Built in 1872, it was nearly destroyed in November 1998, when a third of the pier was engulfed in flames; restoration efforts have now made it home to an array of shopping stalls and food vendors, with magnificent beaches stretching in either direction.

In the hills above Santa Barbara the beautiful Mission Santa Barbara daily 9am-5pm; $4.00 with a colorful twin-towered facade, the so called Queen of the Missions, though it was one of the later ones constructed in California. A small museum displays artifacts from the mission archives. Other missions in the area are Santa In�s, just outside the kitsch Danish town of Solvang heading north on US-101, and La Pur�sima, the most completely restructured of all the missions, about twenty miles northwest of Solvang on Hwy-1.

South Lake Tahoe California
In South Lake Tahoe, the lakesides largest community, dozens of restaurants, small motels, and pine bound cottages stand cheek by jowl with the high rise gambling dens of Stateline, just across the border in Nevada. If you happen to lose your money at the tables and slot machines, you can always explore the beautiful hiking trails, parks and beaches that populate the surrounding area.

Not far away, the prettiest part of the lake is along the South West shore, at Emerald Bay State Park, ten miles from South Lake Tahoe California, which has a number of good shoreline camp grounds. A mile from the parking lot, Vikingsholm is an unlikely reproduction Viking castle summer daily 10am-4pm, hourly tours; $3 In Sugar Pine Point State Park , two miles north, the huge Ehrman Mansion daily 11am-4pm $3 is decorated in Thirties era furnishings: the extensive lakefront grounds were seen in The Godfather II .

The rest of the 75 mile drive around Lake Tahoe is lovely and considered to be one of the most beautiful drives in America. One of the best ways to see Lake Tahoe it is to take a paddlewheel boat cruise on the MS Dixie II, from Zephyr Cove three departures daily in summer, one in winter, call for exact times $23-49 tel 775 588-3508, reached on a free shuttle from South Lake Tahoe California, or sign up for other boat tours through one of the larger hotel casinos.

California Tourism and Hotels Websites: Los Angeles Hotels Hollywood Hotels Beverly Hills Hotels Santa Monica Hotels Downtown Los Angeles Hotels Palm Springs Hotels LAX Hotels
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South Lake Tahoe Hotels and Area Tourism Websites:
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