A few more notes from a native Californian. Disclaimer: I grew up in San Luis Obispo and went to college in Santa Barbara.
Please don't miss Monterey, and when you go, make sure to go to the aquarium.
Oh my goodness, San Luis Obisbo looks absolutely beautiful, as does Monterey!!
Okay, so we're doing a lot of planning today, and have found a lot of day tours that will take us from the main/easily accessible areas to the different places we want to go. we will be landing in LA, then getting a town car transfer to San Diego straight away, itinerary (sort of) is as follows (We'll be catching the Amtrak trains between SD, LA,SB & SLO):
Land in LA
San Diego (3 nights)
Los Angeles (3 nights) + 1 night @ Disneyland Resort
Santa Barbara (3 nights)
San Luis Obisbo (2 nights)
Something else here? Maybe a 2 night tour to somewhere more inland?)San Francisco (4 nights) (several day tours out of the city)
I'm still working out how to get from SLO to San Fran - we'd like to stop somewhere in between, and looked at Monterey, but it looks a bit far. A 3 hour train trip is the max we'd like, and each train-leg of the trip so far looks like 2.5-3 hours on train.
We're currently writing a list (well, I'm compiling a spreadsheet) of every single attraction/event/thing we'd like to do/see, and figuring out how much of it we can do.
I've added all suggestions from this thread to the list, and FH is super keen to see a lot of what was mentioned!
I'm so excited!!
At the moment, the itinerary is 16-18 days, and we'd like to stretch it to a month, if work permits, but at this point, i've found so many awesome things to do in each place on the list, we'll probably just stretch each stay out to 4 nights! woo hoo!!