Why this ride
A proper escape from Los Angeles with roads worth waking up for. 309 km round from Los Angeles - plan on about 3 h 54 of riding. It goes by way of Casa Conejo and Santa Barbara. The line favours views over speed.
CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Pacific Coast to Santa Barbara
Plan this ride
- Recorded distance
- 309 km
- Riding-time estimate
- 3 h 54
- Journey
- Loop
Distance and timing basis
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
Scenic road chapters
Pacific Coast to Santa Barbara fuel gate → Pacific Coast to Santa Barb
Slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did. Water arrives beside the road and stays for 59 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Chapter facts
- Length
- 75 km
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Los Angeles
Route 66 does not end in a blaze of glory. After more than three thousand kilometres from Chicago, the old highway frays into the boulevards of Los Angeles, and its last stretch is a patchwork of Foothill Boulevard, Colorado Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, ending officially at the pier in Santa Monica, with the Pacific beyond. The point on the map here is the old centre, where the city began in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo, and a few blocks of adobe buildings and a Mexican market street, Olvera Street, are still standing, near the grand Spanish-style Union Station, which opened in 1939.
2. Casa Conejo
Casa Conejo is a small unincorporated community in Ventura County, tucked among the suburbs of Newbury Park on the western edge of Thousand Oaks. Conejo means rabbit in Spanish, and the whole area, the Conejo Valley, takes its name from the old Rancho El Conejo land grant of the Spanish and Mexican era. Today it is houses, shopping centres, schools and freeways, set in a basin ringed by chaparral-covered hills that turn green in winter and golden by summer.
3. Santa Barbara
The Pacific Coast Highway has a way of ending in places that look like film sets, and Santa Barbara is the best of them. The city sits on a narrow shelf of land between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the ocean, facing south, which is unusual on the Californian coast, so the sun seems to hang over the water in the afternoon. The red tile roofs, white stucco walls and arched arcades are not an accident. After an earthquake in 1925 destroyed much of downtown, the city rebuilt in a unified Spanish Colonial Revival style, and the result is a place that feels more like Andalusia than Los Angeles.
4. Los Angeles
Return visit. Read the place description above.