California (Eyewitness Travel Guides) - Esther Labi

This listing is for California (Eyewitness Travel Guides) - Esther Labi.

Paperback: 630 pages
Publisher: DK Travel; Revised edition (January 31, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0789494299
ISBN-13: 978-0789494290

This is a good quality, comprehensive travel guide that not only has concise street guides, photos and a variety of places to see in cities up and down California, it also includes historical information, places to eat, stay and shop. I highly recommend it.

I like Eyewitness travel guides, even if I usually complement them with other, more "wordy" ones. This one, like all the other ones I own, is a good, relatively short (but heavy!) guide very helpful to give you good hints about what to see over an area as large as California. The nice pictures are always a big plus.

On the minus side, you will find only a few words about 95% of the locations described in this guide, so if you are looking for something deeper, of if you like historical anecdotes about the places you visit, this guide is not ideal. Another minus is the relatively scant number of hotels and restaurants listed in the guide, surely a result of the large area covered. Also, the information you are given on restaurants is almost invariably composed of 20 words or so. So, if good food is important on your trips, this guide is again not ideal. From the perspective of both real content and good food advice, I think the "Moon" handbooks are vastly superior to the Eyewitness guides. However, the few and B&W pictures in the Moon series will sometimes make even great places sound or look dull.

Again on the plus side, the maps are useful.

Overall, this a good guide to use as a starting point to plan a trip, but if you really care about what you see, you will probably have to buy other material too, and I would suggest looking for a Moon guide to have an ideal combination.

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