Alfred Hitchcock knew a menacing landscape when he saw one, and in 1962 he brought Tippi Hedren and a great many crows and gulls to Bodega Bay to film The Birds. The little harbour town on the Sonoma Coast, about an hour and a half north of the Golden Gate, has been living gently off that fame ever since, and the old schoolhouse that appears in the film still stands a few miles inland in the village of Bodega. But the real show here is the coast itself: a sheltered bay full of fishing boats, a long sandspit, and the granite headland of Bodega Head jutting out into the Pacific.
Come in the morning and there is a good chance of fog. The cold California Current keeps this coast cool and grey on many summer days, while the valleys inland bake, and the light can turn from silver to bright blue in a few minutes as the marine layer burns off. From Bodega Head, between December and April, you can watch gray whales migrating along the coast, their spouts showing white against the dark water. Harbour seals haul out on the rocks, and pelicans patrol the swell in long, low lines.
For riders, Bodega Bay sits at the heart of some excellent roads. Highway 1 runs north from here along the Sonoma Coast, high above the surf, with tight bends, short straights and crumbling edges where the cliffs have slipped. South, the road heads inland through dairy country and over rolling hills toward Tomales and Point Reyes. And inland from Bodega, Bodega Highway and the narrow, twisting Coleman Valley Road climb into the hills toward Occidental, through redwood groves and open grassland with huge views back to the ocean. Coleman Valley is steep, narrow and bumpy, with cattle grids and loose gravel in places, but it is one of the great small roads of Northern California.
The town has fuel, cafes and seafood shacks serving clam chowder and fish and chips, and Sebastopol, about twenty kilometres inland, is the nearest larger town, with everything else. Bring layers even in July: the wind off the water bites, and riders coming from the warm valleys often get caught out shivering in a T-shirt. The best light for photographs is late afternoon, when the sun drops toward the sea and catches the boats in the harbour.