Since California is probably the most filmed place on earth, our preconceptions about the state and its people are shot through with prompts from the screen. In the traveller's mind, a day in Los Angeles consists entirely of drive-by shootings, skate-by babes, musclebound beefcakes and golden beaches. Likewise, San Francisco is peopled entirely by hippies, poets with goatee beards and aromatherapists, all endlessly crossing and recrossing the city's fabulous bridges in VW Beetles.
But contrary to what Baywatch might have you believe, California does not come to a perma-tanned halt two miles inland. It stretches 200 miles east, through some of the most diverse environments on the continent, offering everything from rolling hills to glacial peaks, dense forest to high desert. My plan was to forsake the coast, and to boldly go inland, armed only with a brand-new rental 4x4 truck and a collection of internationally-accepted credit cards. But not before I'd spent a week lolling about in San Francisco. By way of contrast, you understand.
This most beautiful of American cities is possessed of heart and soul. Mercifully bounded by the ocean, it is a cheery town of steep hills and valleys, where clapboard houses and colonial blocks in pastel shades pile up row upon row like dominoes. Which is how they'll fall if and when San Fran experiences its next Big One courtesy of the San Andreas fault, upon which the city founders decided to sling their settlement, unaware that this would one day lead to a foundering city.
But despite falling down roughly every 30 years, San Francisco has played a focal role in shaping the 20th century. Such is the weight of this heritage that the late Herb Caen - the columnist who for 59 years charted city life in the San Francisco Chronicle - warned in 1993 that "living here is a constant battle against nostalgia, the San Francisco disease that clouds all vision and judgment". Yet the city appears to bear the burden lightly, mostly resisting the urge to wallow in the past.
Above all, you remember San Francisco for the views. Climbing up from Union Square towards Chinatown, the streets are great valleys lined with townhouses and skyscrapers, filled by rivers of cars that drop away leaving dizzy views of the Bay Bridge. On the long climb up to Golden Gate Park, a glorious park that runs two miles west right out to the Pacific, the picture is all rooftops and sky, and the smell all spruce and eucalyptus.
John Steinbeck, for many years a resident of the city, called it a place "confident enough in its own greatness to care". On top of that, they've got a thriving nightlife and decent museums. And, in return, all they have to put up with is a little fog in summer and the occasional, non-fatal earth tremor.
It was all very different for the settlers who, enticed first by the lure of the new frontier and then by the Gold Rush of 1849, poured across the US towards California in search of a new life. For them, the state meant hundreds of miles of unremitting hardship in some of the most extreme country imaginable before they even felt a sea breeze.
Fortunately for today's tourist, that unremitting hardship has been swept away by hire cars, motels and diners. Nowadays, you can visit the interior properly in a week, staying in roadhouses along the way, although you'll have to miss out on more than you will see.
The plan was this: to head north-east, skirting around the northern edge of the Sierra Nevada, briefly crossing into Nevada to the gambling and skiing resort of Lake Tahoe, before plunging due south into Death Valley. From there, I'd head west, via Lake Isabella and Bakersfield, eventually joining the quintessential Californian Highway 1, and return north along the Pacific coast.
As you drive upwards past remote lodges housing cocktail lounges and general stores, and through one-diner towns such as Placerville and Fresh Pond and Riverton and Twin Bridges, Highway 50 begins to wind and narrow, skirting precarious cliffs and ravines. Before long - somewhere around 5,000 feet - the snow on the verge is a foot deep and there's an inch of it on the road. If you haven't turned the cruise control off by now, it's probably time you did.
The climb seems endless until, inevitably, you begin to descend, and there, hundreds of feet below, sits South Lake Tahoe, a sort of Las Vegas with snow and water sports. Tahoe bridges the California/Nevada border, but all the fun is to be had at the Nevada end of town. After a day's skiing (depending on snow levels, some of the most demanding slopes in North America are located here), you can head to Caesar's Palace, where the alcohol is free as long as you're gambling.
The main obstacle between Tahoe and Death Valley is the northern tip of the Sierras, which have to be got around or over. In winter, the only way is around, but in early December, Monitor Pass - a single-lane track calling itself Highway 89 - was open. At around 10,000 feet, without another car on the road in this barren, windswept country, you find yourself making anxious glances at the fuel gauge. It would be a lonely and cold place to spend the night. But with views over the Sierras that seem to go on for ever, it is breath-taking.
Once through the pass and away from the glitz of Tahoe, it dawns that California is actually two states - two countries, almost. Where the coast is all warmth and welcome, the interior is bare, harsh country. By midafternoon, under a wintry sun, the temperature dips towards freezing and a dry wind whips off the mountains, chilling to the bone towns such as Walker, whose population is a fraction of its elevation above sea-level (325 to 5,000). In such remote towns, you are certain to find a $20 bed in a motel, where you can swap tales of snowdrifts and road closures with bearded truck drivers and enjoy enormous breakfasts.
But no matter how friendly your hosts, and for all its magnificent views and towering mountains, this is disturbing, lonely country. And nowhere is it more eerie than overlooking Mono Lake, a vast, prehistoric, alkaline lake, ghostly as the sun dies in the chill. Mono dates back 700,000 years, but it has been shaped more recently by volcanic activity. Tufa towers rise out of the water like ramshackle stalagmites, formed by calciumbearing fresh water bubbling up through the alkaline water. The result is a landscape that is not of this world - a vast, glistening basin broken by these strange columns. But even this is as nothing compared with the enormity of Death Valley.
The road into the Valley is an American classic - arrow-straight, with a yellow line guiding the way. It's no wonder the highway is the stuff of legend. In Britain, motorways despoil and destroy everything in their wake, yet in the heart of California the road feels like a friend. Like the railway before it, the road opened up the land, and was the making of this state.
Death Valley measures 100 miles (160 kilometres) from north to south, is 15 miles (25 kilometres) across at its widest point and is the result of 500 million years of geological activity. It is a vast, barren wilderness of unimaginable scale and severity. It is one of the wonders of the world. The mountains that edge the valley - the Panamints in the west and the Amargosa range to the east - were formed between 250 million and 70 million years ago, forced upwards by the unimaginable force of the earth's tectonic plates.
The road back to the coast provides yet another contrast, and perhaps the greatest part of what by now, three days out of San Francisco, feels like a fairly epic outing. West of the forgettable town of Ridgecrest, you find yourself passing through great fields of Joshua trees, green and statuesque in an otherwise parched landscape. As you drop down and down, the landscape softens. Jagged, vertiginous passes give way to gently rolling valleys until, eventually, you top a rise and there sits the Pacific and Highway 1. One hundred miles south of San Francisco along this glorious, inspiring road, you'll find Big Sur, a scattered settlement of artists and city exiles revelling in the most gentle country (and some of the most exclusive real estate) California has to offer.
Here, at Nepenthe, a marvellous, family-owned lodge and restaurant perched 80ft above the sea (the name is derived from the mythical Egyptian drug that induced forgetfulness and brought an end to sorrow), you can sit, cocktail in hand, watch the sun melt into the Pacific and consider the 800-odd miles you've covered, which was worth every turn of the wheel.
