Written by Alireza Saeedmanesh
Welcome to California, the most populous U.S. state and the third-largest by area. California is one of the richest and most diverse parts of the world, with lots of beautiful places to visit. Long holiday weekends are the best time to relax and enjoy visiting California and sometimes U.S. attractive tourism places. One of the best things to explore in California is wide array of beautiful and incredible national parks and wildernesses. It includes:
You can plan to go to each of these incredible national parks in a long holiday weekend. You can use your personal car to go or in case of not having car or preferring not to use your car, you can rent car from different rental cars e.g., Enterprise, Avis, Alamo, Thrifty, Budget, Hertz or others. For your accommodation, you can plan to camp in the national parks or rent a house close to the national parks from Airbnb.
Besides having big cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, California State has also some smaller towns and villages that are equally attractive. These town and villages include:
One of the other amazing cheap fun that you can do during holidays, is to go and enjoy Catalina Island Ferry. You can use Groupon website to get incredible discounts. Catalina Island is just an hour away (22 miles off the coast of Southern California) with boat transportation up to 30 departures daily. Boats depart from San Pedro, Long Beach and Dana Point.
Disneyland Resort located in Anaheim, is the other famous place you can visit during holidays. You can enjoy two amazing theme parks called Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park.
It is worth to visit Los Angeles as the center of the nation’s film and television industry. You could find tours for studios such as Paramount Pictures, Universal and Warner Brothers near the Hollywood sign. Beverly Hills is rich place in Los Angeles which is the site of the famously upscale shopping street Rodeo Drive.
A great experience for long weekends could be visiting San Francisco. You can visit golden gate bridge, Presidio of San Francisco, Baker beach, golden gate park, Coit tower, Washington square, Lombard Street, and Fisherman’s Wharf.
In winter, you can enjoy snowboarding, skiing, and sledding, in Big Bear located in San Bernardino. There is plenty of houses available for renting through Airbnb to stay close to Big Bear Lake.
Let’s take a look at places outside the California state that are worth to see. United States is a good place to have long trips with car. As a good choice for long holiday weekend, you could begin your road trip from California and go toward Los Vegas to visit incredible luxury hotels and skyscrapers.
You would continue your road trip toward Arizona to visit Grand Canyon National Park, with its layered bands of red rock revealing millions of years of geological history.
If the long holiday weekend is long enough to think about traveling to far states by plane, you can find good deals for airfare through student universe website. Among the states, I would recommend to visit Florida, Oregon, Michigan, Colorado, Hawaii, Arizona, Utah, Alaska and Montana. Florida State is known as sunshine states with stunning beaches. Oregon State is known with beautiful forests. Michigan State has beautiful islands and lakes, Oregon State has delightful ski resorts. Arizona has wonderful painted deserts. Utah has wonderful rock formations of Arches and Canyonlands. Alaska is known for its snow-covered mountains. Finally, Montana is worthy to visit for its glorious mountains and blue skies.
Finally for weekends that you might not have enough time to travel far distances, it would be a good idea to explore Orange county attractive places e.g., Mission San Juan Capistrano, Huntington Beach Pier, Coastline in Dana Point, and Beaches & Wilderness Parks in Laguna Beach.