There is an unusual landmark a 20-minute drive away from our home: the Pulgas Water Temple. With classic Roman architecture and a grandiose name, you'd think this was a monument displaced halfway around the world, built by some industry magnate who imported their love of the old world onto the American frontier[1]. Instead, it's one of the terminal locations for the Bay Area's extensive Hetch Hetchy water system, which provides drinking water for multiple Bay Area counties, sourced all the way in the Sierra Nevada mountains. But despite the mundane and utilitarian origins, it's still a pretty cool place, off the beaten path, to visit on a lazy weekday[2].
Then again, if you are traveling halfway around the world to come to the Bay Area, the Water Temple—or any other piece of infrastructure managed by the SF Public Utilities Commission—is unlikely to make your list of must-see destinations. Local travel prioritizes convenience and comfort; the time and cost of international vacations impose a higher sightseeing bar. When people look for hidden gems outside popular vacation spots, it feels more like a kneejerk reaction to tourist overcrowding.
Underneath the debate is a more pertinent question: why do people travel in the first place? There are a bunch of reasons, but the three I'm interested in—those that are tied to the geography more than the traveller[3]—are status, novelty, and immersion.
Status is the loudest form of travel, and it also has the most potential to be obnoxious. This is heading to an exotic location, and hitting all the 'gram spots for selfies or posting continuous updates to group chats. With social media amplifying the same locales, the same restaurants and activities, this concentration is ripe for overtourism, overwhelming areas not designed for the excess attention.
To be fair, I suspect the vast majority of travelers chase status in some form. Arguably, posts about vacation planning for Japan are a kind of flex, and casually discussing winter getaways with colleagues can be considered social signaling. When we host friends and family who travel to the Bay Area, we take them to the crowd-pleasers: blankets of fog rolling across the Golden Gate Bridge, cars slowly meandering down Lombard Street switchbacks, rich chocolate sundaes at Ghirardelli Square. Cliché, yes, but iconic.
Novelty is about going to an unfamiliar place, to attempt to see and experience things outside the daily rhythms of life. My parents, of the generation who couldn't afford to travel in their early years, made this our default raison d'être for travel as a family—that instinct has stuck with me. Thirty years later, we're dragging the kids to Volcanoes National Park and Taichung City in the dead of summer, so they aren't asking to go to the same phở restaurant every week, or worse, parking themselves in front of their iPads to whittle the days away on YouTube shorts.
This type of experience can be had locally. The canonical staycation is less drastic and disruptive to everyday life, but the Bay Area has a good blend of urban and outdoor destinations, local venues that we've steadily visited as the kids were growing up. When they were smaller, the Exploratorium and a trip out to Safari West were fine adventures; as they're getting older, we're hiking the nearby Pinnacles National Park or appreciating the horticulture of the Filoli gardens—stopping by the Pulgas Water Temple on the way, of course.
Immersion is probably the rarest form of travel that I've seen people try. It's the idea of going to a foreign place, and staying there for an extended amount of time to truly live as the locals do, but without the intention of fully becoming an expat and emigrating permanently. I once lived with a roommate whose main goal was to move to Osaka in Japan; last I heard, he figured it out and was enjoying his time there immensely.
To be clear, I'm categorizing immersive travel with the express intent to live among the local population and to integrate with their culture. There's the social media style of digital nomadic travel, whose proponents look for low-cost countries across Asia and Europe; I wouldn't categorize this as immersive travel. Instead, these travelers tend to stay in designated tourist locales, residing in scenic destinations while they intersperse work between luxuries; their lifestyles are closer to status travel, just with elongated stays.
Admittedly, we have not planned our travels for the purpose of immersing ourselves in the world's cultures; we sample them during vacations, and although I emphasize the contrast to the kids in the moment, I know that the tourist experience is sanitized.
Conversely, this is the type of travel that's impossible to replicate locally—I mean, we're already here. Rather, the Bay Area is one of the premier destinations in the world for immersion, just framed differently: people sometimes call it the California dream. They move here to look for opportunity, and to take part in the latest iteration of the proverbial gold rush. Certainly, some end up staying, but many come here to join in the rush; they will return home either when they've made their riches from the boom, or when they decide to leave amidst the inevitable bust.
Of course… that is my family's story as well. As a kid in Vancouver, our family went on road trips all the way down to our cousins in Sacramento, California: a 16-hour drive in a minivan with questionable AC. We saw the famous landmarks of the state as tourists, stopping a day in every major city for photos and memories. By college, I had moved out to the Bay Area to attend Cal, and stayed here post-graduation to take advantage of our abundant tech ecosystem. And, now settled here with my own family, we spend our weekends looking for novel experiences—in familiar confines.
To be clear, we have quite a few of those as well: for example, the Filoli estate, and Hearst Castle, are precisely old, rich guy fancies. ↩︎
They sometimes host weddings on Saturdays so the site is inaccessible; also, they close the parking lot on weekends as the cross street is designated bikes-only as well. ↩︎
By contrast, the types of travel which are bound more to the traveler include: to escape from bad situations; to go back to a familiar place for restoration; to invoke nostalgia and family histories; to add to the personal bucket list; and to partake in specific activities. ↩︎
