It’s a bit weird to be a tourist in California, considering I lived here for a half-century. But when you’ve been getting your “home” mail in the UAE for a couple of years, you’re more likely to see the Golden State in a new light.

And as an “outsider,” I can attest that long stretches of California are pretty special places.

So, Sunday in San Francisco and some great food and a naked guy (not related concepts), we took off for the coast. I had the bright idea of postponing the jog over to Highway 1 so that we could go south to San Jose and start the day at the Winchester Mystery House.

It sounds like a fun concept. Sprawling, bizarre house, built and remodeled (over and again) a century ago by an eccentric, probably crazy lady who was heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune and believed in spirits … take the tour, wander around this enormous nutty place … well, a pretty genuine California experience, right? Plus, I hadn’t been to the place in 40 years, and one of our quartet had never been there at all …

Well, bad idea. It’s just a really random place. Lots of little rooms crammed together, with too many people trying to shuffle through it at the same time, at about $30 a head, being led by a callow kid with a bad attitude, worse diction and holes in his ear lobes about the size of dimes … (An epically bad tour guide.)

Anyway, I couldn’t wait for it to be over about 10 minutes into it. But things were about to look up.

We drove over the coastal range and straight into Santa Cruz and made our way to the pier, which was drenched with sun and caressed by a cool wind, walked out to the end, comparing menus in restaurant windows … and settling on the place with the view of Half Moon Bay and the clam chowder in a bread bowl for $9.95. And the fried artichoke hearts.

We considered the boardwalk and the midway with the little roller-coaster and some other compelling projectile-vomit rides and instead decided to head south on the 1 which sometimes cuts through redwood forests and other times hugs the coast and produces mile after mile of “wow, that’s amazing” sights.

We reached Monterey about 5 p.m. and started off on the famous 17 Mile Drive, a big loop that circles the Monterey Peninsula and cuts through some of the most stunning scenery in the state … country … world.

Apparently, the entire peninsula is given over to posh golf courses, enormous houses and astonishing vistas. Pebble Beach is out there, and Spanish Bay, and overlooks of forest and sea, and Monterey cypress trees, including the famous Lone Cypress.

For a time we considered how much money it would take to live out there, on 17 Mile Drive, and we started with “A-Rod Money” or “Kobe Bryant Money” and ended at “dot-com founder money” … but really ended at “we don’t care about money as long as we have a chance to come out here and pull the car over every mile or so and get out and look at it all.” The quiet beaches and the tide pools, and the otters rolling in the surf, and the forests …

I had been in Monterey a time or three, but never around the whole of the 17 Mile Drive, and it was worth the wait.

We got back into Monterey, found a pub that served fish and chips and some room-temperature Guinness and watched the Giants lost to Arizona on a screen the size of a billboard, and landed in a 1950s-style motel across the street from a retirement home, and that was it, just another day in paradise.