Understand California

Background reading for the state behind the itinerary — how the coast and Highway 1 came to be, how the Spanish and Mexican missions still shape how California looks, how gold and engineered water made the state, and how wine country, the redwoods, and the Sierra form its inland realms.

The coast and Highway 1 The coast and Highway 1 More than any single city, the idea of California lives on its shoreline — 840 miles of it, tied together by State Route 1, the two-lane road that clings to the cliffs of Big Sur and threads the beach towns from Mendocino to San Diego. Understanding how that coast and that road came to be explains why so much of a California trip is spent driving beside the Pacific. Missions and Spanish California The missions and Spanish and Mexican California Before it was American, California was Spanish and then Mexican, and the physical record of that century is everywhere the traveler looks: in the mission churches at Carmel, Santa Barbara, and elsewhere, in place names from San Diego to San Francisco, and in the red-tile, white-stucco architecture that still defines towns like Santa Barbara. This is the layer of California's identity that predates the Gold Rush. Gold, water, and the state Gold, water, and the making of the state Two forces turned a remote Mexican province into the most populous state in the country: gold, which brought a stampede of people in 1849, and water, which had to be engineered and moved to sustain them. The tension between California's wealth and its scarce, unevenly distributed water still shapes everything from the desert resorts to the wine country. Wine, redwoods, and the Sierra Wine, redwoods, and the Sierra Inland from the coast, California splits into distinct natural realms that give the trip its variety: the Mediterranean valleys of Napa and Sonoma that made California a world wine power, the fog-fed redwood forests of the North Coast, and the granite high country of the Sierra Nevada that culminates at Lake Tahoe. Each is a different California, and the state is large enough to hold them all at once.