San Francisco...the grand dame of the Pacific Coast. She is as elegant and sophisticated as Ingrid Bergman was in her love scenes with Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Like Ingrid, San Francisco is a class act, bridging the gap from sophisticated urban life to the laid back eclectic nature of Marin County to the north of the city. The key to getting to Marin is the Golden Gate Bridge.

As a bridge, she is a magnificent, heavy metal highway to the pot of rustic and artistic gold at the end of her bright sunset orange rainbow. The Marin Headlands greet you with sweeping scenery of the ocean, all that lies in the Bay, and of course, a panoramic display of San Francisco spread out before you - a brilliant painting of the urbane and the urban. As you exit that world and enter the world of Marin you have effectively stepped through the looking glass to a culture all it's own, and damn it…they like it that way.

Trippin' out in Tahoe!

Northern California is a delicious landscape of redwood forests and giant sentinel sequoias. For a pure orgasmic adrenalin rush of oceanic proportions, there is the blue vast expanse of the whale watching waters of the wide, deep blue Pacific with it's white foamy waves pounding the rocky California shoreline in a somewhat geologically sexy manner, punctuated with it's in and out Lunar gravitational high and low tide motion. It's a natural high at sea level to be sure.

However, if you're looking for a natural high with altitude, then gas up the road machine, head to the Sierra Nevada mountains and get ready for a Sierra high in the High Sierra as you trip out in Tahoe.

The Eight Mile High Sixties made it easy to hallucinate in the Haight, but it was just as easy to go berserk in Berkeley! If any city in America deserves to be called the People's Republic, that’s the one.

Long before the "Occupy" movement, Berkeley was in the avant-garde vanguard of arts, and was ground zero for the Free Speech Movement that exploded on campus when Mario Savio fired the first free speech salvo over the head of straight America and aimed a head shot at the FBI! Mario Savio was on the free speech front lines fighting for your right to say "Fuck" in magazines without censorship! Don’t forget the battle for Peoples Park. The people took to the streets to reclaim sacred public turf, and in exchange, teargas fills the air on Telegraph Avenue like a wispy puffy shroud of fog penetrating the San Francisco Bay…except this cloud ain't the evening fog and it burns like hell.