Pacific Coast Highway, California State Route 1 · part 1

Scenic road chapters

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 Monterey.

2. 2. Monterey

   Monterey is a town with a layered past, and the best way to read it is to walk from the old adobe buildings of the first capital of Spanish and Mexican California to the shiny aquarium on the water's edge. Spanish explorers anchored in the bay in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and Monterey served as the capital under Spain, then Mexico, and briefly under the United States. Colton Hall, where California's first constitution was drafted in 1849, still stands in the middle of town.

   Read the complete Monterey write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Monterey comes up about 182 km into the recorded legs. Next is Big Sur.

3. 3. Big Sur

   Big Sur is not a town but a stretch of coast, about ninety miles of steep mountains dropping into the Pacific between Carmel and San Simeon, with a few clusters of buildings in between. The Santa Lucia Mountains rise straight from the sea to more than a thousand metres, so the land has almost no flat ground, and the only road is Highway 1, built in the 1930s by convicts and workers who cut a ledge in the cliff. Before that, the coast was reachable only by track or boat, and it still feels remote.

   Read the complete Big Sur write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   about 228 km into the recorded legs you reach Big Sur. Next is San Luis Obispo.

4. 4. San Luis Obispo

   San Luis Obispo is a small city of about forty-seven thousand people, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and for riders on the coast it is a natural place to rest. It lies in a valley of the Santa Lucia foothills, a short way inland from the Pacific, with hills of oak and grass rising on all sides. Franciscan friar Junipero Serra founded Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa here in 1772, and the mission church still stands on the central plaza, next to a creek that runs through the downtown.

   Read the complete San Luis Obispo write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   San Luis Obispo closes the day.