As far as holiday destinations go you’ll be hard pressed to find somewhere quite as diverse as California. California is all about extremes. It has the biggest things (that massive bit of wood above is one of the biggest trees in the world), the best things, the richest things and the most famous things. It also has some of the poorest things and tackiest things.

If you haven’t already I highly recommend your next holiday is a driving tour of California. Book the flights, hire a convertible and then drive from place to place experiencing it for yourself. There’s so much to see that you can easily drive for two to four weeks and see something wildly different each day. World famous cities, national parks, deserts, vineyards, beautiful coastline, the film industry, the internet industry and plethora of food and activities are some of the main draws.

Naming everything you should visit would be, if not impossible, a massive chore. So I won’t. Everywhere you go is interesting for one reason or another, from the old gold country, to the outrageous TV, to Apple, Facebook and Google’s HQ’s, to cosy little motels in the national parks. We loved it all. Below is a small selection of must sees.

10 Tips for Exploring California

• Voluntarily walk into the world’s most famous prison, the now defunct Alcatraz in San Francisco.
• Experience San Francisco’s hilly streets by riding around on one of the antique cable cars, drive down the bendiest road in the world, eat in stunning restaurants and cycle across the Golden Gate bridge as seen in more movies than you can shake a stick at (X Men 3, Rise of the Planet of the Apes to name two). Try to go to the truly magical antique penny arcade too.
• Stand at the foot of the world’s biggest tree, General Sherman. By big, I mean bleedin’ big. It’s taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighs the same as ten blue whales. This thing is BIG. So is the rest of the Giant’s Grove in the Sequoia national park. Which was home to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi – yeah I know, geek out amazing!
• Drive through the Mojave or Death Valley deserts and stop at a diner. You will feel like you are in an 80′s US film like Tremors or Critters.
• Leave California briefly to visit Tacky Ville aka Las Vegas, the adult version of Disney Land. You can never prepare for the mind blowing tackiness of it all, nor the scale. While you’re there, pop across to the Grand Canyon. Yes, just pop over to the Grand Bloody Canyon! Amazing.
• Go celebrity spotting in Los Angeles – I was excessively excited to see Shania Twain laying her star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. While in LA, try to experience the food and nights out of West Hollywood. Warning: Hollywood itself is ming.
• In LA also visit the La Brea tar pits, an active excavation museum that is still churning out thousands of fossils including sabre tooth tigers and mammoths. Trot on up to the Getty Museum for amazing LA views. You kinda have to go to Venice Beach where Baywatch was filmed even if it too is ming.
• Drive with the roof down along Route 1, the coastal road connecting San Francisco and LA. It genuinely is beautiful with lighthouses, beaches, cliffs and stinking colonies of Sea Lions. Hearst Castle is also worth a visit even if ‘castle’ is a massive fat lie because it isn’t one.
• Eat as many big fat American breakfasts as possible. We were there for two weeks and I can’t remember a day when we didn’t have a fry up with waffles or pancakes. Delish. Remember, what you eat on holiday, stays on holiday. Once our breakfast even had a starter of blueberry muffin.
• Yosemite National Park has to be on your list. Yosemite Valley is like a Disney scene brought to life. There are deer, bears, waterfalls, giant sequoia trees, cute little critters, cliffs etc. It’s huge, it’s beautiful, and like nothing else on earth. Must see territory.

Life getting you down? Nothing living up to expectations? Still waiting for something genuinely amazing to happen, like, say time travel? Then give up on this rubbish life (no not suicide) and start a virtual one (no not Facebook) using a games console like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. If you don’t play games you won’t believe me until you try, but your life isn’t complete until you’ve experienced a life changing game. And I don’t mean Angry Birds or The Sims.

Video games have come a long way. A loooong way. I mean, they’re no Matrix or Star Trek Holodeck (I built it up too much didn’t I?), but it’s as close as you’ll get for the time being. Games exist now that can resonate with you for years after you’ve played them. I know because I’ve played them. It’s now years later and they still resonate with me. This can’t be a phenomena unique to me. Can it? No it cannot.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t claim to have genuinely believed I am in another world living another life. Playing the best games in the world does give you a taster of what this would be like however. Similar to eating at a five star restaurant, you don’t know what it’s like to be rich, but you have experienced a micro-moment of it. I’d rather have a taster of an alternative life than not at all. So like books and films, certain games can enrich your life like nothing else. Do not pop your clogs without being enriched people.

10 Top Tips to Experience Virtual Life

List written in May 2011, no doubt there will be many more experiences to add in future! That’ll ruin the top 10 though, so I’ll leave it as is. K?

1. If you’ve ever fancied yourself as the next Clint Eastwood shooting up Red Indians or Jake Gyllenhaal shooting up… er, well, it’s probably time to get another dream. Or play Red Dead Redemption, the closest thing you’ll get to a genuine Wild West cowboy experience. No film, play or book can compete with this magnificent experience set in the United States and Mexico (out on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3).
2. Obsessively wished you could experience Renaissance Italian life since you were a child? Nah, me either, but I have experienced a taster of it in Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. It was magnificent. Once you’ve met Leonardo de Vinci and then later assassinated the Pope in a perfectly recreated Vatican, you’ll never look back. Mama mia etc (out on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3).
3. No doubt you’ve often wondered what it would be like to wake up hundreds of years in the future to find the entire world population is dead and you’re the only human trapped in a facility run by bonkers robots. Of course you have. So play Portal 2 for its amazers story and tricksy puzzles (out on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or PC).
4. On a similar note, play Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas to find out what it’s like in a world that’s been utterly destroyed by nuclear war. Such fun (out on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or PC).
5. It’s likely that you’ve often longed to know what it’s like for your child to be kidnapped while you’re out shopping. Course you have! Now you can in the emotional and devastating Heavy Rain (out on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3).
6. Dead Space is a few years old now and it has a fully fledged high budget sequel, but the original invokes such heebie jeebies that it far surpasses the heebies in the Alien films’ jeebies (out on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3).
7. Alone in a world with your dead girlfriend. Bring her back to life by murdering giant animals and live with the consequences. You won’t forget Shadow of the Colossus (on Playstation 2 and 3, coming out in HD in 2012).
8. Escape the hubbub of work, family and friends by experiencing life isolated in the midst of space playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (out on the Nintendo Wii). Alternatively, live aboard a busy starship trying to save the galaxy in Mass Effect 1 & 2, the closest thing to Star Wars since… Star Wars (out on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3)
9. Live the New York high life as an illegal immigrant caught up in gang warfare. New York will look like Grand Theft Auto IV once you play it and not the other way around. So much more than violence and fast cars, you will never, ever, ever forget this experience*
   (* maybe, out on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3)
10. There’s something special about living life as Lara Croft, and it’s not just experiencing her ample bossom. Tomb Raider Underworld won’t blow you away, but its tropical adventure will capture the imagination. If you don’t get Lara Croft, instead opt for the critically celebrated Uncharted 2, the male version of Tomb Raide… OK, OK, Uncharted is leagues ahead of Tomb Raider. Imagine Indiana Jones only better because you’re controlling it (both out on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3).

Call me crazy, cat crazy, but you haven’t lived until you’ve befriended a cat. No, not owned one or played with one, but genuinely befriended it. ”How will I know if we’re friends?” You may naively ask. The answer? You won’t, and you never will. Fool. A cat will never tell you if it likes you, or if it’s just messing with your tiny mind. It may be looking at you while not thinking anything about you at all, the ultimate snub. Either way, you’re achieving some kind of mystical link between humankind and catkind.

Up there, above this, you will see a picture of a cat. His name is Rumbles. Fluffy, isn’t he? Rumbles likes to give signs that make us believe we’ve befriended him, but don’t be tricked. Purring and face rubbing are merely cat irony. He’s having a right little chuckle to himself. Look at his face. What is he thinking? Impossible to say. He could be happy, angry, mindlessly thinking nothing or downloading my thoughts to beam back to his home planet.

Although you will never know if you have succeeded in your mission to befriend a cat, the virtuous circle of trying will make your life complete. I therefore highly recommend to all people on earth to try, try and keep trying. At the very least it might make them go easy on us come judgement day.

10 Top Tips for Befriending a Cat

1. Acknowledge the fact that the cat is smarter than you.
2. Give the cat an amazing name like Mr Fluff Wuff while also holding reserve nicknames for stomach turningly pathetic attempts to befriend it. We’ve chosen the nauseating “Pookie-pooks” to show how low we will go to befriend Rumbles.
3. Cats love celebrity. Photograph the cat doing ridiculous things and upload to the internet to boost its celeb status (e.g. figure 1.0 above of Rumbles).
4. Look into adopting a cat because there are millions without homes *ultimate sad face*. There are lots of organisations to help you adopt, but you could do worse than start with RSCPA’s adoption site, Cats Protection, Cattersea (Battersea Cats & Dogs home), the Blue Cross and many others in your local area. Saving a cat is a good step to befriendship.
5. Understand that the cat is almost guaranteed to be a genetically enhanced alien designed specifically to appear to you as the cutest thing on earth. If you don’t believe in aliens, you could adopt Darwin’s theory of evolution and accept the fact that the cat has evolved into the cutest thing on earth through natural selection over many millenia. Either way, you must know that the cat is finely tuned to getting its own way by being the cutest thing on earth. You can try to resist and you will fail.
6. Do not show weakness.
7. Spay or neuter the cat after six months, our world is already overrun by these critters. Chip the cat too, they have a tendency to torment other humans by fooling them with their befriending tactics. Make sure your cat doesn’t get away.
8. Snuggle the cat.
9. Talk to the cat. You may wrongly assume that cats don’t know what you’re saying, but they in fact understand language and thoughts all too well.
10. When a cat goes “brrrrreee-yup” you may be onto a winner. While not yet proven, there is some evidence to show that this trilling noise is the only hint at breaking down the steel barrier.

No, that picture is not an illusion. Nor is it blockbuster CGI, although I admit it does look it. It is I, submerged in Egypt’s Red Sea to a whopping depth of about six metres. Yes, I could have dived that deep without the ridiculous getup. However! I am not wearing a skin tight synthetic rubber suit and tubes for the thrill of it (at least not this time), it’s there to help me dive to the deepest depths.

If you haven’t learnt to dive, you haven’t lived. And if you haven’t lived, well, it isn’t a very fair deal when you die. So my recommended remedy is that you learn to dive and I would suggest the Red Sea as the ultimate place to start. SCUBA diving is a magical experience because you can float around weightlessly, see an incredible range of underwater life, explore truly beautiful landscapes, swim through ship wrecks from the first and second World Wars and it’s the only place you can actually find Nemo in his natural habitat! Believe it: SCUBA diving = finding Nemo.

Of course, it’s not just Nemo you’ll find down there. You’ll see the Little Mermaid’s pals, Happy Feet, Jaws, Moby Dick and of course Flipper will protect you. There is simply no other experience like diving on earth because you can’t be deep underwater for extended periods of time without the equipment. FACT. If you’re nervous of diving, don’t be. If you think seeing pictures, film or visiting an aquarium is enough, you’re wrong. Imagine never visiting earth above water and seeing it second hand through a screen… See what I mean? Pants. Dive and breathe 40m underwater, you will not regret it.

10 Top Tips for Breathing 40m Underwater

1. Don’t get to 40m only to realise you’ve forgotten the equipment.
2. Don’t actually stay at 40m for long, best to stay about 10 – 30m.
3. Dive in groups. Spare air is super handy.
4. There are a number of recognised training organisations, the best known is PADI. Surprisingly not run by an Irishman.
5. Swim with a manatee to see why they’re called sea cows, then wonder why sailors used to mistake them for mermaids. Clearly those sailors had been at sea for a very, very long time.
6. Always spit, never swallow.
7. Learn to dive initially in a swimming pool. It’s more controlled, calmer and there’s less risk of breaking coral. It can take decades for coral to grow and you don’t want to be responsible for destroying decades of growth with a rogue flipper*, do you? You evil b@stards.
8. Remember flippers are actually called ‘fins’. Don’t call them flippers or you’ll look stoopidz (*except in point 7 above for comedy value).
9. Seeing sharks is actually amazing, except if you see a really big shark. At which point you are legitimately allowed to be worried. Piece of advice – if you want to avoid sharks, don’t dive near them. You can easily dive without seeing the dangerous type of shark. I wouldn’t jog past lions, you can avoid sharks by following similar procedures.
10. Find Nemo. He rocks.