King City, Calif. -Say you decide to visit this beautiful sounding city only to discover there is no king? Would you be surprised? Probably not.

What about going to Diamond Bar hoping to find diamonds or Orange, hoping to eat oranges- Apple Valley to eat apples (yes they do still have apples!)— Fish Camp for fish- and Seal Beach to watch seals? The names of California cities often were derived a century ago when there was an abundance of oranges in Orange County and seals in Seal Beach.

Some of California's most interesting city names describe what inspired locals: Paradise, Sunset Beach, Shell Beach, Harbor City, Needles, Three Rivers, Redwood City, Cool, Big Bear Lake, Sunnyvale, Riverside, Redlands, Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Twentynine Palms, Angels Camp and Greenfield. These are just a few of the cities you might pass through on California road trips.

Most the time when you read the city signs with interesting names, you look around slightly perplexed to see the reality doesn't appear to match the name. With some imagination you try to roll back the clock to another time to envision what must have been there when the name was chosen.

If you had the opportunity to name a city or town knowing that fields and orchards give way to houses and high-rise buildings as time goes on, or maybe in several hundred years a non-oceanfront city now sports Pacific Ocean views, thanks to sea level rises, what sorts of names would assign?

Popular names on the Internet that currently resonate with the public such as Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Bing are extremely successful, but will they withstand the tides of time, and does anybody want to live in city called Google?

When you try to put your finger on what these descriptively- named cities and things are about, oftentimes you discover that like yourself-Jessica, Bob, Kristin, Hamilton, Mercedes or Matt-there is complexity and uniqueness about you or your city that has nothing to do with your name. It's just a name, though many cities and people have changed theirs due to the challenges that an assigned name creates in life.

Do California cities deliver on their names? If you don't take the names literally, oftentimes you can accept that the name is part of the city's history, or the large imaginations and visions of those who called it what it is.