California

I drove into California from Mexico on a Tuesday morning, crossing the border at Tecate with a thermos of coffee and no particular plan. By the time I reached Highway 1 north of San Simeon, the road had narrowed to a single thread of asphalt stitched along cliffs five hundred feet above the Pacific, and I understood immediately why people talk about Big Sur the way they do. It is not a place you can summarize. The light changes every twenty minutes — marine layer burning off at noon, then flooding back at four, then that brutal golden hour at six when the whole coast turns the color of old copper. I pulled over at every turnout and still felt like I was missing something.

Cities that never agreed to be one place

California makes no sense geographically and total sense culturally. The cities are discontinuous. Los Angeles is a hundred neighborhoods that never quite agreed to become a metropolis — Silver Lake and Boyle Heights and Leimert Park each feel more distinct from each other than most European capitals feel from their suburbs. San Francisco is a city built on hills so steep the municipal buses struggle on them, and the fog that rolls through the Golden Gate every afternoon turns the whole peninsula silver-grey and intimate in a way that no photograph has ever captured correctly. San Diego, down at the border, is the easy one, with beaches and a relaxed pace, and Santa Barbara adds red-tiled Spanish colonial roofs between the mountains and the sea. Inland, Ojai is a small valley town known for its orange groves and its slow, bookish calm.

I kept going back to the small things that make each of these cities distinct. In Los Angeles, it is the way a street of palm trees can end at a taco stand and a mural. In San Francisco, it is a corner café where the fog presses at the window and everyone orders hot drinks in July. Santa Barbara has a courthouse tower you can climb for a view of rooftops and sea, and San Diego has a harbour where sailors, joggers and sea lions all appear to have agreed on how to share the water.

The north coast and the big trees

Go north past San Francisco and the state changes again. Mendocino sits on headlands where Bishop pines grow sideways from the prevailing wind, its Victorian houses facing a sea that is almost never warm enough to swim in. Farther on, The Lost Coast is the stretch where the highway gives up and the shore is left to hikers, and Redwood National Park holds the tallest trees on earth. Walking among them, the sound drops away and the scale of the place rearranges your sense of time.

Sierra, desert and wine

Inland, the Sierra Nevada is the other California. Yosemite is crowded in summer for a reason, with granite walls and waterfalls that fill the valley with noise in spring, and Sequoia National Park holds giant trees of a different kind, thick rather than tall. Lake Tahoe is a deep alpine lake on the Nevada border, good for swimming in summer and skiing in winter.

East and south of the mountains, the desert begins. Death Valley is the lowest and driest place in North America, a place of salt flats and dunes where the silence is part of the scenery. Joshua Tree is gentler, with boulder fields and twisted trees under enormous skies, and Palm Springs is the oasis town at its edge, with midcentury architecture and pools that glow at dusk.

Wine country sits north of San Francisco: Napa Valley is the polished, famous one, and Sonoma Valley is the one I prefer, with more small producers and a slower pace, plenty of room for a long lunch under oak trees.

Roads connect everything, but I would resist the urge to rush them. The drive from the Sierra to the desert can cross a high mountain pass and a salt flat in the same afternoon. Pick up food at roadside stands in the Central Valley, where stalls sell citrus, almonds and dates by the bag, and treat the long empty stretches as part of the landscape rather than the obstacle between views.

What to eat

The food is the thing I come back to. Californian cuisine in the sense of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse and the farmers’ market religion that spread from Berkeley to the rest of the world — that is genuinely one of the most important culinary ideas of the last fifty years. But the food that matters to me on the ground is different: the Korean barbecue strips of Koreatown on Olympic Boulevard at midnight, a breakfast burrito from a Salvadoran truck in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Oxnard, a bowl of tonkotsu ramen in the San Gabriel Valley at a counter with no English menu, fresh Dungeness crab on a plastic tray at a seafood shack in Bodega Bay. California’s kitchens absorb the whole Pacific Rim and the whole of Latin America and turn it into something that belongs entirely to here.

When to go: September and October are California’s best-kept secret — crowds thin after Labor Day, fog retreats from the coast, and the Central Valley light turns golden. Spring (March to May) is green and mild everywhere. Summer works for the Sierra Nevada and the desert evenings but avoid coastal fog disappointment in June along the central coast.

What most guides miss: They treat California as a road trip you can knock out in two weeks. You cannot. The state is larger than most countries, and the distances are real even when Google Maps makes them look manageable. Plan around one or two regions properly rather than driving yourself exhausted chasing everything — the person who spends four days on the Lost Coast sees more of California than the one who drives LA to San Francisco to Yosemite in ten days, stopping only for gas.