Hey SB!
Yeah, if you're looking for scenery, Yosemite is good but Utah just blows it out of the water. If you've got three weeks, and you're coming in summer or early autumn (basically any time between May and September, though probably the early or late end of that range because summer is hot and you're headed to the desert), you can do something like this:
- Rent a car out of San Francisco. Make it something awesome - a big badass Corvette is the ultimate pick if you can stretch to it;
- Drive to Yosemite;
- Take the Tioga Pass over the top of Yosemite and out the back;
- Drive up and over the White Mountains, where the four-thousand-year-old bristlecone pines are;
- Drop down to Vegas for a couple of days;
- Head up to Zion National Park, which is ridiculously lovely;
- Drive across Utah Route 12, which is the most incredible bit of the trip - there's a five-mile stretch along a mountain ridge with three-thousand-foot drops on either side of the road and the most mindboggling views ever;
- Cut across to Bryce Canyon National Park, which, also ridiculously lovely;
- Strike out across Capitol Reef National Park into the Utah desert, all the way across to the little town of Moab, and Arches National Park right nearby;
- If you've got the time and the interest, at this point you can take a side trip to any or all of these: Durango (a cute little mountain town in southwest Colorado); Santa Fe (the oldest and most scenic state capital in America); Los Alamos (the home of the nuclear bomb, and the home of the totally awesome Black Hole junk shop); Painted Desert National Park; and Meteor Crater;
- Drop down through Page (where you can see the monstrous Glen Canyon dam) and Cameron (which is a great place to pick up some authentic Native American souvenirs) to the Grand Canyon south rim;
- Blast back across the desert to Vegas;
- Dump the car in Vegas and fly back to SF - or, if you rented a really awesome Corvette that they won't let you do one-way, do the drive back to SF via the stupendously beautiful Highway 1 and the cute little clifftop hippie enclave of Big Sur.
I've done this drive before, and it is literally THE BEST ROAD TRIP EVER.
The map (for the first half, anyway - Google won't let me do more) looks a bit like this.
Depends where you go. If you go down to Paso Robles, about three hours south of SF, you'll generally get the wine tasting for free if you buy a bottle. Napa likes to charge for tastings, but it's totally worth it - I paid about $40-ish at the Opus One vineyard for a glass of the '04 and it was INCREDIBLE. I'm also a fan of Duckhorn vineyards - they do a very salubrious wine-and-cheese tasting in their back garden for about $30-ish.
Pro tip - if you go to Napa, drive up to Yountville and rent an electric bicycle, then do your tasting tour on a bike! It's way more fun.
