Great California Landmarks and Where to Find Them Quiz

Answer: San Diego

San Diego is a beautiful city with warm weather, gorgeous beaches, and a storied history. Originally inhabited by native people such as the San Dieguito, the La Jolla, and the Kumeyaay, San Diego flew four other flags before joining the United States: the Spanish Empire, the First Mexican Empire, the United Mexican States, and the California Republic. A local's favorite destination is Fiesta Island, an undeveloped peninsula minutes from downtown where dogs are welcome even off-leash. Fiesta Island is a unique doggy paradise of little waves and lots of sand.

San Diego has world-class zoo that TripAdvisor ranked as number one in the U.S. in its 2015 Traveler's Choice awards.

Answer: La Brea Tarpits

Who would expect to find a fossil-packed tarpit in the middle of an urban Los Angeles neighborhood? Scientists have been digging up plant and animal fossils from the La Brea Tarpits since the early 1900s; some of the fossils found so far are at least 40,000 years old. One such find is a nearly-fully intact skeleton of an Ice Age mammoth nicknamed Zed. Zed can be seen at the George C. Page Museum next to the tarpits.

Answer: Fresno

"Fresno" is the Spanish word for the ash tree, and its hot climate and long growing season make it the perfect place to cultivate raisins. In fact, virtually all of the raisins produced in the U.S. come from Fresno or its surrounding area.

Fresno has a distinct kind of fog called tule fog, as it appears over the tule wetlands. Low-lying and thick, it tends to evaporate within a few hours. If you visit Fresno, don't miss visiting the Forestiere Underground Gardens. Created by a Sicilian immigrant, the gardens are actually in underground rooms, based on the catacombs of ancient Rome.

Answer: Father Junipero Serra

Father Junipero Serra was born in 1713 on the island of Majorca and grew up to be a Roman Catholic priest in the Franciscan order. In his 30s, he set sail for the Americas and eventually established nine of the 21 Spanish missions that run from San Diego to San Francisco.

Santa Barbara is by any measure a beautiful city, and, unlike most coastal cities in the state, it faces south, as it juts out into the Pacific on its own. One of its natural beauties is the Moreton Bay Fig Tree, a giant tree over 80 feet tall that offers more shade area than almost any other tree in the U.S.

This image gives a rough idea of what a California mission can look like.

Answer: Big Sur

Big Sur offers some of the most stunning scenery you'll find in the U.S. It has sweeping views of the Pacific, trails that wind through pine forests, and a network of tiny beach coves. It has multiple protected areas, including several marine conservation areas, the Julia Pfieffer Burns Underwater Park, and the California Sea Otter Game Refuge.

Many artists and writers have drawn inspiration from Big Sur, including Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, and Ansel Adams.

This picture is of Bixby Bridge which connects Big Sur with Carmel to the north of it. It opened in 1937 and was named after a local businessman and lime developer. It went through seismic retrofitting in 1998.

Answer: Victims of her husband's Winchester rifles

Sarah was married to William Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, maker of the Winchester Rifle, which was influential in the Civil War and western land battles. After her infant daughter and her husband died, Sarah consulted a medium, who told her the spirits of the people who had been killed by her husband's rifles were haunting her. Sarah set out to confuse those spirits by creating a haphazardly-built mansion that you can visit today in San Jose, California.

San Jose lies near the southernmost tip of the San Francisco Bay. It's situated between San Andreas Fault and the Calaveras Fault, making it vulnerable to earthquakes and, because it has several mini valleys in its borders, it has over a dozen micro climates.

This picture was inspired by the strangeness that is the Winchester Mystery House.

Answer: Palo Alto

Palo Alto means "tall stick" in Spanish and you can visit the actual tree the city was named after; it lives in a tiny dot of a park squashed among a train station, one boundary of the Stanford campus, and a couple busy downtown streets. The tree -- actually called El Palo Alto -- has gone through some rough times of drought and neglect but a team of city arborists are now keeping this California landmark as healthy as possible.

This image is a rough sketch of Hoover Tower, which houses the Hoover Institute on Stanford's campus. It is named after Herbert Hoover who studied at Stanford before he became President of the U.S. in 1929. From the observation deck on a clear day, you can see all the way to the San Francisco skyline, over 35 miles away.

Answer: Huge waves

"Mavericks" can actually have several meanings but they all pertain to the gigantic waves that crest off the coast of Half Moon Bay, which is about 30 miles south of San Francisco. Mavericks can mean the location of the waves, the beach where they hit, the winter season when the waves are at their highest and fiercest, or the invitation-only competition held there generally annually.

The swells are shockingly huge and only the most experienced big-wave surfers would even attempt to ride them, even off-season. Maverick waves are generally anywhere from 25 to 60 feet high. In comparison, Mission Beach in San Diego averages three foot waves most of the time, with five foot being the average in the winter months.

This image is supposed to be of a surfboard. Mavericks got its name from the first brave big-wave surfers who surfed the area; one of them had a dog named Maverick who liked to paddle along.

Answer: Lombard Street

Unlike the image here, the real Lombard street has eight hairpin turns. The one crooked block is made of cobblestones, is extremely steep, and has real people living in the really expensive houses that line either side.

San Francisco's population burst when people came to California looking for gold in around 1848-49. Other landmarks in San Francisco include the storied island of Alcatraz, the Ferry Depot, and the city's historic cable cars which are still functional.

Answer: A lost humpback whale

In 1985, a humpback whale was migrating from Mexico to Alaska when he took a right instead of going straight. Rather than turning around, he just kept going, swimming across San Francisco Bay and up the Sacramento River, into an ever-narrowing freshwater habitat and nearly 70 miles from the ocean. Staffers from the Marine Mammal Center, the Coast Guard, and hundreds of volunteers tried to steer Humphrey back on course using a variety of methods. As each day passed, Humphrey became more listless. One attempt was playing the sound of orcas -- not friends of humpbacks -- and of generally unpleasant noises in the hopes of getting Humphrey to turn around. When that didn't work, an acoustic specialist offered the team his recordings of other humpbacks in the hopes of drawing Humphrey out. Playing these underwater required an underwater transducer and the mobilization of several more military units but it ultimately worked and Humphrey returned to the friendly salty waters of the Pacific past the Golden Gate Bridge.

Humphrey had more misadventures to follow but this was enough for one lifetime.