Oh, And If You Like Garlic...
...Gilroy, California, "Garlic Capital of the World" is not that far away, perhaps a 75-mile drive south of San Francisco. Also in that general area is San Juan Bautista, perhaps the most beautiful of California's old Spanish missions; it's the one seen in the Alfred Hitchcock film
Vertigo. It still looks almost exactly as it did in the film, except for the infamous bell tower, which never existed in reality; it was a special effect. Monterey, whose coastline doubled for both Monte Carlo's
and Cornwall's in the Hitchcock film of
Rebecca, is also in that vicinity. Big Basin State Park has unbelievable redwoods (also seen in
Vertigo).
The terrain in this area is extremely varied; one of the reasons America's motion-picture industry is located in California is that almost any imaginable kind of scenery can be found there.
Oh, and driving further south will take you to San Simeon, the fantastical castle William Randolph Hearst built for his mistress, movie star Marion Davies. I'm providing a link to the Wikipedia article on San Simeon, and all I can say about visiting the place is, you will
not believe your eyes. This is not a royal palace; it's the summer house of a newspaper tycoon. It was originally complete with its own air strip, railroad siding and zoo. Much of what you see is old, but the buildings themselves are of 20th Century construction; Hearst bought European panelling, ceilings, stonework and statuary like a madwoman at a jumble sale and had it all fitted to his castle. Only a self-made American would have had the brass to build anything like it.
en.wikipedia.org
