California

California is less a single destination than a geography of contrasts held together by a coastline. The state runs nearly the full length of the western seaboard, and within its borders it contains the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States, the driest desert in North America, and forests of trees that were already old when European explorers first arrived. Travelling through it requires a car and a willingness to cover distance — but the distance is the point. Highway 1 along the Big Sur coast, with the Pacific dropping away below and the Santa Lucia mountains rising behind, is one of the great drives in the world.

San Francisco and Los Angeles anchor the state's cultural life but differ in almost every respect. San Francisco is compact, walkable, and shaped by hills that divide the city into distinct neighbourhoods — the Mission's murals and taquerias, the Castro's Victorian painted ladies, the fog-wrapped avenues of the Sunset. Los Angeles sprawls across a basin and only reveals itself when you stop expecting it to behave like a conventional city: it is a collection of neighbourhoods connected by freeways, and its cultural life — in Silver Lake, in Culver City's gallery district, in the food trucks of Boyle Heights — is proportionally vast. Between the two cities, the Central Valley produces a significant share of the world's almonds, wine grapes, and stone fruit, and the wine country of Napa and Sonoma rewards a detour.

Yosemite Valley is the most visited section of California's national park system, and the crowds in summer are substantial — but the scale of the granite walls makes even a crowded valley feel magnificent. Sequoia and Kings Canyon, further south, contain trees of dimensions that are difficult to process in person: the General Sherman Tree, the largest living thing by volume on earth, stands in a grove where the light filters down through a canopy that is simply unlike anything else. Death Valley, in the southeast of the state, is best visited in winter, when temperatures are manageable and the desert floor can bloom with wildflowers after rain.