It was not our intention to spend 13 days in California but it happened. We had more friends and relatives offering us places to stay than we counted on or could do.

Our experiences of California are as varied as the state is itself. It is hard to really comprehend how vast and disparate California is. It is about 740 miles south to north; that’s about as far as New York City is from Atlanta or London is from Milan or Madrid; and 200 or more miles wide; more than the distance of New York City to Washington D.C. Given its size, California is really multiple states–something most Californians would readily affirm. We drove from just north of the Mexican border up into Oregon after we entered the state via Las Vegas. We saw multiple Californias. Here is my brief take on them.

1. The Desert – The southeast corner of the state is a desolate wasteland where nothing can live but scrub and a few people. Why anyone would want to live there is beyond me. Temperatures reach 120 Fahrenheit and rain is a distant myth. The Mojave Desert and Death Valley are out here–two of the most inhospitable places on Earth.

2. Sand Diego County – When people think “southern California” they think L.A. but the San Diego area has its own identity. Slightly less crowded than L.A. and much more relaxed, San Diego is one part surfer dude and one part U.S. Navy, but survives that seeming contradiction. Just north of San Diego are the best beaches along the Pacific Coast and lovely little seaside towns. Almost immediately from the coast there are high mountains that quickly give way to the desert to the east.

3. Los Angeles – Sprawling, smoggy, and under constant threat of wildfires and earthquakes, everyone in the world knows L.A. A country unto itself, this is the land of Hollywood, valley girls, Disneyland, slums, and suburban hell. The only thing wider than its freeways is the disparity between the ultra-rich and the very poor. Compton and Beverly Hills are only 15 miles apart but might as well be different planets. Los Angeles, like most of California, was Spanish for centuries before English-speaking Americans came; a fact lost on the “English-only” white xenophobes that live here.

4. The Central Valley – Chances are you ate something today that grew here. This vast agricultural region stretching from Bakersfield to Redding is warm year-round –it’s how you can get lettuce in January. Though it has a few medium-size cities it is mostly farms and usually very large factory farms. It almost gets as hot as the desert here but has irrigation mostly through diverting much of the water from multiple rivers like the Colorado, Sacramento, and others, often with serious environmental effects.

5. The Bay Area – Right-wingers love to hate this place, but the talk of “San Francisco morality” is exaggerated. Sure, there is more tolerance for homosexuals and alternative lifestyles in general, but this is not the hippie mecca it is made out to be. Like L.A. it is expensive, crowded, difficult to navigate, and about to be destroyed by an earthquake. The fakey-glamor of L.A. is not here, though the yuppiedom of wine country is, and the wreckage of the dot-com bubble are.

6. The North – The almost forgotten part of California, north of wine country and east of the central valley is a land of few people but tremendous scenic beauty. This is the land of sequoias and redwoods (many of the world’s oldest and tallest trees), Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta, and wilderness galore. Shared by hikers, climbers, hippies, and loggers it is independent and isolated and parts of it actually threatened to succeed from California.