Pacific Coast Highway, CA, USA
The Pacific Coast Highway is often said to be one of the world’s great road trips. We collected our rental Mustang-or-Similar in downtown San Francisco, with a plan to take it slow, stop in a few motels along the way, and arrive in Los Angeles at the end of the week.
Our Mustang-or-Similar in this case was a bright red Chevrolet Camaro. We played with all the buttons until the roof retracted, and with the sun on our heads we headed south out of the city for our first stop on the road trip, the little town of Santa Cruz.
I mainly know of Santa Cruz thanks to a song by The Thrills. And they’re right, it isn’t, so we arrived there surprisingly early and had a wander along the pier, watching some playful little seals who live underneath it, and grabbing a coffee before heading to our first real stop on the road trip, Monterrey.
When we reached Monterrey we drove into our motel, the Villa Franca Inn, and parked up outside our room (for me, an essential part of a US road trip). Monterrey is mainly famous for the sardine tinning factories of Cannery Row, the John Steinbeck novel of the same name, and the aquarium. We wandered down to the harbour, took one look at the ticket prices for the aquarium, decided fish are actually quite boring and instead sat on a bench looking over Fisherman’s Wharf as afternoon turned to evening. We had some dinner at Alvarado Street Brewery, and headed back to the motel for an unusually early night. Got to take this road trip business seriously.
The next day was the big one, driving along Big Sur, one of the most famous and scenic sections of the Pacific Coast Highway. The road winds through a 71-mile section of the California coast, past redwood forests, rocky coves and wild sandy beaches. It was off-season and conveniently at the tail end of a global pandemic, so we had the road entirely to ourselves. To our left, the foot of the Santa Lucia Mountains; to our right, the Pacific Ocean and ahead of us, mile upon mile of open road. Every so often, the road would open up into a particularly straight section, and I could put my foot down, the engine of the Mustang-or-Similar roaring over Nicola’s California playlist.. It felt like a proper road trip.
At one point we stopped at a little creek and Nicola had a dip, while I very helpfully kept an eye out for bears. We stopped at a little bakery for some snacks, and later a tiny gift shop selling all sorts of hippyish stuff. Driving through Big Sur is truly a perfect way to spend a day.
Along the way to our next motel we stopped to see the elephant seals at San Simeon. And I can say with absolute certainty that it’s one of the most disgusting sights I’ve ever witnessed. Great galumphing lumps of fat seal were slobbering around, snorting and wheezing. Every so often two would get into a row and attack each other, a squirming mass of blubber slapping and rippling into each other. It was foul. You often hear in documentaries about the sheer beauty and majesty of nature. This was not it. Nasty buggers.
Our next night was in Cambria, a tiny little town with a smattering of motels. We stayed at the quaint little Bluebird Inn and ate a couple of doors down at the cosy Black Cat Bistro. When we woke the next morning to continue the drive, a sea mist had rolled in overnight, and the car was covered in a thin white layer of frost.
Now this is the section where I use a little creative licence. We were originally meant to head from Cambria down to Santa Barbara before finishing the Pacific Coast Highway trip in Los Angeles. But due to the Superbowl, hotels in LA were insanely pricey, so we switched the two, heading first to LA, then coming back to Santa Barbara. But you'd normally do it the other way round, so we’ll pretend that’s what happened, as it makes for a far more logical read.
Before hitting Santa Barbara we stopped in the ‘celebrity enclave’ of Montecito, home to Oprah, Harry and Meghan, Gwyneth, Ariana Grande and a load of others we don’t recognise. My theory is that these people have an awful lot of money and therefore a lot of choice in where they choose to live. So if they’ve chosen this corner of the world, it must be quite nice. And it is. We sat in the little village-like row of shops, sipping on extortionate coffees, and debated the merits of living a life of freedom here in sunny Montecito, versus being stuck in a damp cottage in Windsor and having to open grim village fetes.
Celebrity residents aside, Santa Barbara itself is a chic little Spanish colonial style town with a fairly limited range of things to see and do. A few shops, restaurants and wine bars, its main tourist appeal is as the starting point for vineyard tours in the surrounding wine estates. As we had our own wheels, we toured a few of the vineyards on our own steam, before discovering they all have tasting rooms in Santa Barbara itself. Excellent news. And this is where we spent the rest of our time.
As you leave Santa Barbara and head towards Los Angeles, the Pacific Coast Highway gets wider and busier, and becomes part of the 101. But it’s not over – as you approach LA, the 101 heads north, and the Pacific Coast Highway drops down once again to hug the coast for the last few miles. Here the road skirts the sandy Pacific beaches of Malibu, where surfers’ vans are parked up and little seafood shacks on stilts cling to the cliff edge.
The full Pacific Coast Highway starts up north in Seattle, and ends near the Mexican border in San Diego. But as road trip routes go, you can’t go too far wrong with the section between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s a cliché, but the true star of this adventure is the road itself, a wonderful little ribbon of asphalt winding its way through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.
