Eccentric California Travel Guide
Quirky and Offbeat West Coast Attractions Listed in Top Guidebook
Jan Friedman's book on California's bizarre sights and events covers the state from Crescent City to San Diego via Los Angeles, San Francisco and wacky places inbetween
It's hard to write a book about Eccentric California, says author Jan Friedman in her Introduction to this title in the excellent series of 'Eccentric' guides from the Bradt Travel Guide series. That's because eccentric means not conforming to the usual rules of society, and in California not conforming is normal. Despite that handicap Friedman has managed to produce 192 pages of eccentric people, places and events in a top guidebook that has already won three major awards, including the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award for travel journalism.
Eccentric California is obviously no conventional California travel guide. If you want to find out where the cheap Los Angeles hotels are, look elsewhere. Disneyland does not appear in the index. If, however, you want to meet an artist in residence at a city dump, or taste California wine while wearing a Marge Simpson wig, step inside these wonderful pages.
Author Jan Friedman has lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay area, and is already the author of Eccentric America in this Bradt Travel Guide series. In her Preface she says that 'every society needs a fringe', and in America it's out there – way out there – on the west coast in California. Friedman goes on to give some examples of what she found when researching Eccentric California – touring San Francisco in a fire engine, people who decorate their car with Pez dispensers and people who do mass mooning of Amtrak trains. Well, you kind of see what she means.
To make sense of this nonsense, Friedman provides a guide to the guide, breaking Eccentric California up into several sections:
- The Eccentric Year
- The Regions
- Keeping Current
- Maps and Admission Charges
- Categories
The last section is how she divides up the 475 entries she decided were worthy of inclusion, so this is sub-divided into 13 categories including Festivals and Events, Museums and Collections, Quirkyvilles, Tours, Odd Shopping, Quirky Cuisine, Rooms with a Skew and, one to savor: Just Plain Weird.
To give a taster of the kinds of eccentricity this Eccentric California travel guide covers, here are a few samples from some of the sections:
- Rooms with a Skew: how about the Vision Quest Safari B&B in Salinas, a guesthouse where your breakfast might be delivered by an elephant or a baboon – trained, of course, and possibly even the star of a TV show or a movie.
- Festivals and Events: the World's Ugliest Dog competition held annually in Petaluma. Or maybe the International Worm Races that take place in Clear Lake.
- Museums and Collections: like the Signalfan Museum of Traffic Control in Fullerton, dedicated to the preservation of historical traffic-control devices.
There's no more to say, other than 'buy it!' Eccentric California is the best kind of California Travel Guide. It makes you want to go there, and spend a year visiting all these offbeat California attractions.
Visit the Eccentric America website.
Eccentric California is published in the UK by Bradt Travel Guides at £13.99, and in the USA by The Globe Pequot Press at $19.95
