After a good nights sleep at the very lovely Monterey Hostel, Rich and I headed off the next day to cover over three hundred miles of the Pacific Coast Highway route, taking in the sights on our way to Los Angeles and our next hostel in Hollywood.
It wasn’t the brightest of days for our road trip but it was warm and the forecast assured us there wouldn’t be any rain so we headed off to our first point of interest, Lovers Point.
It is one of the few points on the west coast where you can watch the sunrise over the water. However, after our late arrival into Monterey, we didn’t make it up for sunrise in the morning!
“Not being people to give up so easily we continued on.”
When we arrived we went for a clamber over the rocks, taking in the beautiful views out over Monterey Bay and then took a few minutes to sit on the grass banks above the beach, which were covered in beautiful pink flowers. We saw lots of sea birds and even a couple of playful squirrels down by the rocks too!
From Lovers Point we drove south past Point Lobos State Reserve, with stunning coastal scenery on route. We didn’t head into the reserve itself but did enjoy the views on offer at roadside lookouts.
With jagged rock cliffs, lots of beautiful flowers and grazing cows in fields, we certainly enjoyed the vistas.
Instead of continuing down the Pacific Coast Highway over the well known landmark Bixby Bridge, we turned left off the highway and drove fourteen miles along the Old Coast Road down to Big Sur.
The Old Coast Road isn’t very well known and you don’t get a lot of tourists on it, in fact I think we only passed two or three cars the whole time we were on it and the views we were afforded were absolutely stunning and very different from those on the new coastal road.
Turning onto the Old Coast Road we drove for about a mile before we stopped the car and had a fantastic view of the Bixby Bridge behind us. The old road isn’t so much of a road however and is more of a dirt track. We did in fact talk about turning back onto the main highway at this point as we didn’t have a four wheel drive car and we thought our convertible Mustang might not be the most appropriate car for the rest of the drive ahead!
Not being people to give up so easily we continued on the Old Coast Road knowing that there weren’t any more places to turn back round!
“It was definitely a sight to behold and not something we thought we would see on Californian beaches!”
We drove through towering redwood trees, up and down winding loose dirt tracks filled with potholes and over gloriously grassy hills. We took it really really slowly and if we’re honest there were times when we were cursing ourselves for taking this route in the Mustang. We did get some funny looks from the few cars that we did pass as well, they must have thought we were crazy!
After miles of crawling in the car we eventually drove over the brow of a hill and had a stunning view of Big Sur down over the coast where we could see the Pacific Coast Highway below us. It looked so flat and boring that at this point we were really pleased with our adventurous trail!
Back on the Pacific Coast Highway we were back to great views of the coastline, with the Pacific Ocean lapping at the feet of the cliffs. We enjoyed these views for an hour or so before stopping at Elephant Seal Rookery in San Simeon.
We knew we were in the right place as soon as we got out of the car as the smell was an assault on our nostrils! Elephant seals are not the most pleasant smelling mammals and with hundreds of them sunbathing on the beach the smell was somewhat overwhelming.
It was definitely a sight to behold and not something we thought we would see on Californian beaches!
Our road trip continued down to Santa Barbara and along the seventeen mile Scenic Drive. A different kind of scenic from the natural beauty of the Big Sur coastline, we drove by huge gated houses, alongside golf courses and schools with stunning views of the sea. We knew we were in an expensive part of the world here!
“We knew we were very lucky indeed to be able to make the comparison between such stunning places.”
We pulled into Santa Barbara harbour and walked down onto the beach. It was getting late in the afternoon, the wind was picking up as the temperature dropped. It was a quiet beach except for the kitesurfer’s carving through the waves off the beach.
The final part of our drive was into Los Angeles and Malibu’s palm tree lined roads before arriving in Hollywood, our base for the next two nights.
Reflecting upon our Pacific Coast Highway drive, which is well known to have spectacular coastal scenery, we realised that we had been truly spoilt with coastal views on our round the world trip.
Although the views of the day were indeed spectacular they really didn’t compare, in our opinion, to those coastal drives we did in South Africa, New Zealand and Hawaii and we knew we were very lucky indeed to be able to make the comparison between such stunning places.
Lambs on the loose 