Pacific Coast Highway: San Francisco to Leggett

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. San Francisco

   San Francisco hits you with its hills first. The city sits on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific and the bay, and the streets climb and drop at angles that make a fully laden motorcycle feel like a mountain goat. The Golden Gate Bridge, completed in 1937, spans the mouth of the bay in International Orange paint, and when the fog rolls in from the Pacific, as it often does in summer, the towers rise out of the white like something from a dream.

   Read the complete San Francisco write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   San Francisco is where the day begins. Next is Point Reyes Station.

2. 2. Point Reyes Station

   Point Reyes Station is a single street of low wooden buildings in a green valley north of San Francisco, and it has more good food per metre than most cities. It sits on the Pacific side of Marin County, at the southern end of Tomales Bay, beside Highway 1, with dairy farms and cattle ranches stretching away toward the hills. The town has a bakery that draws queues on weekend mornings, a famous creamery that makes cheese from local milk, an old-fashioned feed store and a bookshop, and the pace is slow and friendly.

   Read the complete Point Reyes Station write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Point Reyes Station comes up about 63 km into the recorded legs. Next is Mendocino.

3. 3. Mendocino

   Mendocino looks like a New England fishing village that was picked up and dropped on a California headland, and that is more or less what happened. Lumbermen from Maine built the town in the 1850s, shipping redwood from the forests along the coast, and the wooden houses with their water towers and picket fences still stand on the bluff above the Pacific. It was so convincing that television used it as the setting for a fictional Maine town in a long-running detective series. Today it is a haven for artists and weekend visitors from the Bay Area.

   Read the complete Mendocino write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 280 km into the recorded legs you reach Mendocino. Next is Leggett.

4. 4. Leggett

   Leggett is where Highway 1 gives up. After hundreds of miles of salt air, fog banks and cliffs that fall straight into the Pacific, the road swings inland through the redwoods of Mendocino County and simply ends at a junction with Highway 101, in a clearing among enormous trees. The village is tiny, a scatter of buildings along the Eel River's south fork, and the nearest towns of any size, Laytonville and Redway, are each almost thirty kilometres away. That tells you most of what you need to know about how empty this corner of California is.

   Read the complete Leggett write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Leggett closes the day.