Since I am the only native Californian most of my English friends and family know, for the better part of 14 years they have been asking my advise on what is essentially the exact same West Coast trip: LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Yosemite, Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. They invariably want to know if they can see it all in two-weeks and I say, "Sure, if you never get out of the car." Not once, never, ever, have I been listened to and every single time when I ask how the trip was, I get a sheepish answer, "We didn't see much...we spent so much time driving..."
California is HUGE. It's nearly twice the size of the entire UK. Driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas takes a solid 9 hours going the fastest, most boring route; 14 hours if you want to see anything interesting along the way. Vegas to the Grand Canyon is five-hours each way so if you plan to do it in a day you'll have about 10 minutes to look at the canyon if you don't want to drive back in the dark. I easily put 3000+ miles on a hire car during my annual three-week trips. I am totally fine with this because I love driving and I've, you know, seen California a few times before but for first time travellers it's probably a bit much.
Be that as it may, in the spirit of hope over experience I will offer the following guide to my one and true home.
First, have a good long think about how much money you are willing to spend and how much weight you want to gain- now double both figures. You don't want any nasty surprises later on.
Chop your list down dramatically. Abandon Vegas and the Grand Canyon and make that a separate trip. Vegas is awesome in its horridness; the Grand Canyon is overwhelming and can only be appreciated by hiking down into the belly of the beast. There are no day-hikes in the Grand Canyon, or at least none a sane person would attempt. It is a vertical mile down to the river and unless you posses Greek god-like leg muscles and the stamina of a pack animal, getting down and back up in a single day is a recreational impossibility. Claire and I did a half-way trek that saw us descending from the rim just before nine in the morning (three-hours too late according to the pros) and ascending in the mid afternoon. Coming back up damn near wasted her and even I, a comparatively fit regular gym goer, was wheezing like an old radiator by the time we reached the top.
Vegas is the societal equivalent of watching car accidents for fun. I have been in casinos and seen them wheel little old ladies up to slot-machines in their push chairs so that they can deposit the last of their monthly Social Security cheque, now converted into nickels and dimes, into the coin slot. There are no clocks in casinos and they keep the lighting finely tuned to a dim twilight. Time is measured by the passing of your cash into their hands. Drinks are free while you are gambling and the streets outside are lined with pawn shops. There is nothing the town likes more than a drunk on a losing streak willing to hawk his gold teeth for a handful of cash.
Vegas is so over-the-top repugnant that it must be seen once in your life- if only to understand why the rest of the world hates Americans. Just not on your honeymoon. Even if you get married there. Trust me, I learned this from personal experience.
Forgoing Vegas and the Grand Canyon will allow you to concentrate on California awesome.
Down to business.
Avoid Los Angeles like you would drunk yobbos after a football match. No one with any sense would build a city like Los Angeles in front of an ocean as lovely as the Pacific. It is soul destroying, stark and lined with concrete and stucco strip-malls. It is true indeed that the sun always shines in LA but what it shines on should be immediately covered up and locked away in a disused and rarely visited part of the nearest abandoned salt mine. If you are forced by airline schedules and ticket prices to fly into and out of LAX, ensure that you have a rental car waiting upon arrival so that you can immediately flee up Hwy. 1 to Santa Monica, Malibu, Ventura and lovely, lovely, Santa Barbara.
If I didn't have family in LA I would never set foot in the place. Not that you can actually set foot anywhere in LA because everyone drives. Everywhere. All the time. Your feet won't touch pavement during your entire stay.
Much better to fly in and out of San Francisco. SFO is a well designed, efficient airport that has convenient public transport links and rental car returns. LAX is what airports would look like if the Russians had won the Cold War.
If you insist on spending time in LA you could visit...no, never mind. I can't even bring myself to write anything. It is simply too depressing. You're on your own.
Assuming you have picked up your car from the rental lots at the airport (there are shuttle buses because, you know, walking isn't a thing) head north up the 405 freeway (all motorways are numbered) for about 10 miles until you get to the interchange with the 10. Take the 10 West to Santa Monica. If you take the 10 East you will go back into LA and honestly, no one wants that do they?
After about five miles the 10 West turns into US Hwy 1 North. Hwy 1 will be your best friend for the duration of your journey and this narrative. It snakes up the state, mostly hugging the coast and will provide you with some of the most mind-stunningly beautiful vistas to be found anywhere.
Continuing on the 10 you'll go through a little tunnel and suddenly be confronted with the beach at Santa Monica, don't be sucked in, there is better to come. Santa Monica gives way to Malibu and then Zuma. In between rows of overpriced beach front shacks you will be able to see sand, sun and surf. Past Malibu the traffic thins out and it will be tempting to roll down the windows, or the top, and listen to the Beach Boys. Give in to this. It's OK. I'll wait.
Feeling better now? Of course you are, you're in California- hell yes!
You'll follow the beaches up Hwy 1 for about 90 minutes before it joins up with its big brother, US Interstate 101, the Ventura Freeway (Americans name their freeways.) Get on the 101 North and in 40 minutes or so you will enter the gates of paradise, better known as Santa Barbara.
Santa Barbara California, my home town, out there on the edge of the Pacific. I spent 26 years trying to get out of Santa Barbara and nearly every second of every day since leaving trying to get back. But that's a story best saved for another time.
You'll need a place to stay and believe me, it will cost you. There are plenty of B&Bs in Santa Barbara and they're all around the £100-150 per night mark. I've stayed at The Cheshire Cat Inn and The Eagle Inn and liked them both. There is no shortage of hotels by the beach that vary in both quality and price. We've stayed at The Harbor View Inn several times and they are great, if a little pricey, however they sometimes run off-season deals.
Santa Barbara has some of the best seafood anywhere. It also is home to great Mexican joints where you'll be able to taste all of the flavours of south of the boarder cuisine without the amoebic dysentery.
For fish you can do no better than Brophy Brothers. They overlook the yacht harbour, accept no reservations and are always packed. The Shoreline Beach Cafe is one of the few places that you can actually eat on the beach. Their food is great and not crazy expensive.
Perhaps our favourite restaurant in Santa Barbara is Chuck's of Hawaii and we go there at least once on each visit. Claire says their steaks are the best she has ever had and their salmon is nothing short of perfect. Make sure you get the rice as it is stunningly good. When you go to the salad bar cover your greens with the best blue cheese dressing I have ever had- and I know me some blue cheese.
For pizza go to Taffy's (make it a thin crust), for lunch go to Sojourner Cafe - mostly vegetarian and some of the tastiest food I have ever had. Order a "Cafe Sojourner" for a multi-layered coffee extravaganza. 2017 update: it appears that Sojourner is now CLOSED! I am gutted.
Your poor English taste buds have never experienced the thrill of proper Mexican food so grab some napkins, a bi-lingual dictionary and follow me.
Some of the best Mexican food anywhere can be found at La Super Rica, a 1950s style stucco monstrosity in the heart of Santa Barbara's seriously Hispanic district. The queues at this place are around the block at lunch time and it has all the ambiance of a disused munitions bunker but dear lord they can cook up a mean taco.
If you want to actually sit down while you are eating, try The Rose Cafe. My dad moved to Santa Barbara in 1947, the same year The Rose Cafe opened and while they have both aged well, The Rose makes better chicken enchiladas. For a slightly more up-scale eatery, La Playa Azul Cafe is hard to beat. If it's a warm enough evening take a table outside. I recommend the two-chicken taco combination with rice and beans. And corn chips. Lots and lots of corn chips.
Santa Barbara is home to three types of people- retired, homeless and college students. The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is the town's largest employer and in the 1960s the area around the campus held the world record for the highest population density on the planet. Because of this never ending supply of fit young things Santa Barbara has a pretty lively club scene. Most weekends the clubs and bars along the lower part of State Street (the main drag) are hopping. It is well worth noting that a night out in the city centre of Bristol and a night out in Santa Barbara are two very different experiences. The latter involves far less vomiting, public urination and shameful taxi rides home from the police station the following day.
If you get homesick there is even a quasi-English pub called Old Kings Road where you can get a pint of Guinness but the football on TV is strictly of the American variety.
While recovering from your hangovers make sure to grab a cup of the best coffee in town at The Santa Barbara Roasting Company. Follow that with a good old greasy spoon breakfast at The Farmer Boy. Set aside your notions about breakfast being a meal comprised of three kinds of rubbery pork-like substance, beans, cold, un-buttered toast and runny eggs cooked in so much fat that they slide around the plate unassisted. You're about to have your first proper American breakfast and you're going to need a bit of coaching. Here goes...
The waitress will assume you to know what you want before you look at the menu. Don't waffle. If you ask her to come back you will never see her again. She is a professional and expects you to be the same. Go in knowing what you want and how to order it. Don't get fancy, stick with the basics: two eggs, crispy bacon, hash browns, wheat (not "brown") toast, orange juice and coffee. Say "yes please" when asked if you want ketchup and Tabasco- even if you don't what to do with it, it's better to have it sitting on the table unused than to be without it completely as people will stare.
In the US there is no such thing as brown sauce so don't even ask. If you bring your own in little packets nicked from a motorway service stop and pour it on your eggs they will take them away from you and bring you back "clean" ones. Put the ketchup and Tabasco sauce on your hash browns.
Bacon is thin, streaky and the best in the known universe. I'm not sure what they make "bacon" out of in England but my best guess is abandoned truck tyres.
Knowing how to order eggs is vital. After 15 years, Claire still gets it wrong and brings shame to my entire family. In the UK there are three types of eggs: scrambled, poached and fried (runny). In the US there are the following:
Scrambled
Scrambled with bits in them (ham, onions, peppers)
Sunny side up (closest you will get to an English fried egg)
Poached (almost never ordered)
Once over (flipped so that the top is not runny but the yolk doesn't go hard)
Over medium (flipped and cooked until the yolk is partially hard)
Lastly, there is over-well (sometimes called "over firm". A Frisbee. The yolk is a hard, yellow mass surrounded by rubberised white- this is how Claire likes them but I love her anyway.
Omelets are a whole 'nother story. All American omelets are three-egg affairs bulging with anything the chef has handy: avocados, olives, mushrooms, prawns and wedges of melted yellow cheese.
If you decide to be adventurous and order pancakes, know that they are normally at least an inch thick and that a "short stack" could feed a Somali family for a week. NO ONE puts sugar or lemon on pancakes in the US. Butter and maple syrup is the norm, although blueberry syrup is an acceptable substitution.
American coffee, like American beer, is watery and uninspiring. They try and make up for this by giving you free refills (of coffee, not beer) but each cup makes you hate yourself a little more.
For years I wondered why Claire seemed to have such difficulty ordering at restaurants in the States. Her timing seemed off and often times the server and her would end up staring blankly at each other until I intervened. At first I thought it was a problem with her accent but then I realized that the entire ordering process in the US and UK are fundamentally different. In the UK, and indeed most of Europe, the customer expects the waiter to give them a list of choices. In the US the server waits for the customer to say how he or she wants something done. Claire would ask for toast and the waitress would stand there waiting for her to say what type of toast and Claire would be waiting to hear what types they had. Don't let this happen to you.
Two other things. First, it is considered polite for the waiter to bring your bill before you ask for it. In fact, if you have to ask for the bill most waiters will feel that you want to rush out because the food or service has been poor. Second, unless the waiter or waitress has personally murdered your entire family, it is expected that you tip at least 15%- it is rarely automatically added to the bill.
Now that you have been fed and watered, it's time to see some sights. Simply walking around Santa Barbara is delightful. Apart from the omnipresent homeless population and their trusty shopping trolleys, the urban landscape is charming. There are planning regulations in Santa Barbara that dictate that homes and business must follow strict style guidelines- these tend toward old-world Spanish with red tile roofs and whitewashed walls.
Take a walk from The Arlington Theatre down State St. all the way to Stearns Wharf and back the other side. It will take you a couple of hours at least but if you get tired there are little white electric buses that run up and down the route. They used to be free but now I think they cost .50 cents. The shops and restaurants along State Street run the gambit from up-scale chain stores to mom-and-pop craft shops. From the 600 block down to the freeway is the club zone. State St. passes under the freeway and ends at the wharf.
Parking in Santa Barbara is generally pretty easy to find. There are several down-town lots and the first 75 minutes is free; the hourly rate after 75 minutes is ridiculously low. Street parking is also generally plentiful except on weekends but be careful- for three blocks on either side of State Street you have to move your car every 75 minutes or get a ticket. Don't try and get away with simply rolling a few feet forward- you have to move to a different block. The parking enforcers in Santa Barbara ooze from the same mould as their brethren across the world; they eat their young and give no quarter.
Do not miss the Santa Barbara Court House and make sure to take the lift to the top of the tower- it's a great view of the city.
The pride of Santa Barbara is the mission. It was built in 1786 by the Spanish- or I should say by American Indians enslaved by the Spanish and is the best preserved and most beautiful of all the missions in California. I know this because I did a report on it in 5th grade. Europe is overrun with centuries old majestic cathedrals bejewelled with stained glass windows reaching skyward toward almighty God. Santa Barbara's more humble offering leans more toward the provincial but they did the best with the materials at hand.
Past the mission and into the foothills, not far from where I grew up, is the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. If you are anything like me you probably think of public gardens as havens for crotchety blue-haired OAPs and sexual deviants. However, the SB Botanic Gardens are actually pretty cool. It is less a formal garden and more a well maintained run of hiking trails through a canyon. I honestly love the place and took Claire there on our first trip to California. The little creek that runs along the bottom of the canyon is nothing short of terminally charming.
Have an expensive drink in the bar at The Biltmore and then walk along Butterfly Beach just outside. Timing is essential as you want to set down your glass and be on the beach about 30 minutes before the sun dips below the horizon. You will thank me for this later.
As you look out over the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara you probably will notice the Channel Islands. These are the tops of an ancient mountain range that was cut off when the sea level rose (another report in 5th grade). For years the Channel Islands were privately owned and used by cattle ranchers. There are species of plants and animals out there that live nowhere else in the world. There are also a host of archaeological sites where they have found complete mammoth skeletons and fire pits where said mammoths were barbecued by early California residents. I have been out to the islands, been diving off the islands but never set foot on the islands. Access was strictly prohibited for years but they have now made them national parks so it is possible to visit them with a guide. If you would like to do something in Santa Barbara that I never managed to do, take a trip to the Channel Islands.
It's is almost midnight and we're not even out of Santa Barbara. I think you are going to get this in instalments. The next chapter will be Santa Barbara north to Big Sur and Carmel.
Author's Note: I wrote these California travel guides to my niece and her husband when they were planning their honeymoon. I'd like to expand on the three chapters I wrote for them and do an entire series covering San Diego to the Oregon border. If there are any publishing agents willing to sponsor this project please don't hesitate in the slightest to get in touch.
