California Class Trip

We begin our day our on Hollywood Boulevard. We see the Walk of Fame, where stars dedicated to celebrities dot the sidewalk, TCL Chinese Theatre where celebrity handprints, footprints, and autographs mark the ground of the forecourt, Babylon Court, a mall the design of which was borrowed from DW Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance, and El Capitan Theatre, the home of Disney on Hollywood Boulevard. We visit the Hollywood sign and Griffith Observatory, from which we enjoy magnificent views of Hollywood, Downtown Los Angeles, and the Pacific Ocean. We end the day with a visit to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive is one of the most famous streets in the world and is known for its world-class, luxury shopping.

Alternatively, we take the day to enjoy Universal Studios Hollywood, a theme park which is also a still-operating film studio. Here there is an opportunity to take a studio tour, to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and to enjoy the park’s many rides.

This morning we leave Los Angeles for Morro Bay. We visit Morro Bay State park, which contains a saltwater marsh, lagoon, and natural bay habitat. The museum boasts exhibits related to Native American life, geology, oceanography and local wildlife. We then continue up the coast to Hearst Castle in San Simeon. The castle was built for publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, and has hosted Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Calvin Coolidge and Winston Churchill. The castle was the basis for the palace “Xanadu” in Orson Wells’ movie Citizen Kane, a film which satirized Hearst. We enjoy dinner together on the Central Coast.

We begin our day in Monterey where we see Cannery Row, a waterfront street which used to be the site of sardine canning factories and was the setting of John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row. We’ll walk Fisherman’s Wharf which was built in the 1870s and at one point served as a fish market. Today it is lined with restaurants and shops and often serves as a viewing point for sea lions. We have some free time in Monterey with an optional visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The aquarium is known for its regional focus and makes it its mission to “inspire conservation of the ocean.” We travel on to Stanford University in Stanford, CA one of the world’s best institutions of higher education, and then on to San Francisco where we spend the night.

We start out with a guided tour of San Francisco, including sights like its Fisherman’s Wharf, a historic waterfront neighborhood, and Pier 39, a major tourist attraction boasting shops, restaurants, street performances, virtual 3D rides and more sea lion viewing. We visit Alcatraz, the famous island prison located in San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz’s security and island location led to the belief that it was inescapable. We tour the Embarcadero, San Francisco’s eastern waterfront, as well as San Francisco’s Chinatown, the largest Chinatown outside of Asia and the oldest one in North America. We enjoy a ride on one of San Francisco’s famous cable cars. Established in the late 1800s, the San Francisco cable car system is the last manually operated cable car system in the world. We visit Ghirardelli Square. This block of the city was purchased by Domenico Ghirardelli in 1893 in order to serve as the headquarters of the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. The company’s headquarters were moved in the 1960s and today it is a public square containing shops and restaurants. We make our way to Haight-Ashbury, the birthplace of the 1960s counterculture movement.  This is the location of the Grateful Dead House, where Jerry Garcia and his bandmates lived. We visit Golden Gate Park, the third most-visited city park in the United States which is often compared to Central Park in New York City, before enjoying dinner together. If the Giants are in town tonight there is an option to attend a Major League Baseball Game at Oracle Park.

This morning we walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. This world-famous feat of engineering connects San Francisco to Marin County. In Marin County we visit the US Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model Visitor Center in Sausalito. Here we see a working, hydraulic model of the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta System. We then visit Point Reyes National Seashore, a protected coastline that contains beautiful beaches and is a viewing point for migrating gray whales. On the final day of our trip we enjoy dinner together and spend the night in San Francisco.

After breakfast we begin our journey home.