GetMap

California

United States of America · 10 quests

Nature

1 quest
Joshua Tree, California🇺🇸 California
Joshua Tree
A yucca gives this desert its name

Art

2 quests
Salvation Mountain, California🇺🇸 California
Salvation Mountain
Tires and car parts sit inside this painted hillside
Cabazon Dinosaurs, California🇺🇸 California
Cabazon Dinosaurs
Two steel dinosaurs rise beside the freeway

Food

3 quests
Tonkotsu Ramen, California🇺🇸 California
Tonkotsu Ramen
Pork bones make this broth turn cloudy
Fettuccine Alfredo, California🇺🇸 California
Fettuccine Alfredo
The Italian version uses no cream
Prime Rib, California🇺🇸 California
Prime Rib
Its thin slice comes from a standing roast

Beach

1 quest
Santa Monica Beach, California🇺🇸 California
Santa Monica Beach
Wooden paths cross the sand for a reason

Sport

1 quest
Dodger Stadium, California🇺🇸 California
Dodger Stadium
Thirteen no-hitters have been thrown here

Party

2 quests
Coachella, California🇺🇸 California
Coachella
The whole festival happens twice
False Idol, California🇺🇸 California
False Idol
The bar hides behind a refrigerator door

United States of America

Photo quests in California

What the catalogue actually holds here, and which of it is worth rearranging a day around.

California holds ten quests across six categories, led by Food with three — though only just, with two in Art behind it. The one category with nothing in California so far is History.

One is tier 1, the tier kept for what a visitor would not have found on their own: Coachella. It is also the only quest here whose check-in asks for PRO; the other nine are open on any plan. Tier 3 covers seven of them, which is the label for what a visitor would expect a travel app to have anyway.

A food quest names the dish rather than the restaurant: the pin sits on the room that serves it, but what you are going for is the plate. Art covers the work and the building around it, so a mural on an ordinary street counts alongside the collection with a ticket desk. Every check-in works the same way: the geotag your camera wrote into the photo has to land within 200 m of the quest's own point.

By category

Each of these opens the whole category across every city, with the California quests among them.

Tier 1

The unexpected ones

The one quests in California the catalogue files as finds rather than fixtures — the half of a city a guidebook has no room for.

Nearby

Cities near California

Ranked by distance rather than by border, because from here the next useful stop is often the one in the next country.

Questions

About quests in California

How many photo quests are there in California?
10, across six of the seven categories the catalogue uses. The deepest groups are Food (3), Art (2) and Party (2). Nothing in History here yet — a category appears in a city the moment a quest is published into it, so the gaps move. Among them: Joshua Tree, Salvation Mountain and Tonkotsu Ramen.
What is there to do in California beyond the obvious?
One of the 10 quests in California is tier 1, which is the catalogue's own mark for a find rather than a landmark: the pipeline that writes it is told that tier 3 is "everything a visitor would expect a travel app to have", and that tiers 1 and 2 are "only the unexpected finds". California holds one at tier 1, two at tier 2 and seven at tier 3. The tier 1 quest here is Coachella, in Party.
Can you do all the California quests on one trip?
Not as one walk. The outermost of the 10 is 643 km from the middle of the California list, which makes this a region rather than a neighbourhood: several are a day out in their own right and are worth planning as such rather than fitted in.
Which California quests can you do for free?
9 of the 10 can be checked in on the free plan, and all 10 can be read and travelled to without paying anything — the catalogue is open signed out, on every plan. PRO covers the check-in on the hardest tier, which in California means one quest: Coachella.
How do I prove I visited a place in California?
Take the photo at the place and upload it. Your browser reads the location the camera wrote into that file and measures it against the quest's own coordinates; inside 200 m the check-in counts. The distance is measured to the point, not to the city: being in California is not what is checked, and a photo taken across town from Joshua Tree fails exactly the way one taken at home does. A file with no location in it cannot be checked at all, and a photo that has been through a messaging app usually arrives that way — upload the original out of the camera roll rather than a copy someone sent back to you. The Food quests in California sit on the room where the dish is served rather than on the dish, so that address is what the 200 m is measured from.