I’m currently on holiday in California. One of the pleasures of travelling around California is that you get the opportunity to drive down (or better yet, up) California highway 1.
California 1 runs up the coast from Orange County to Mendocino County – from Southern California’s suburban heartland to Northern California’s rural hippie economy. (Like parts of New Zealand, Mendocino is home to a vibrant marijuana industry.) Along the way, it runs through Los Angeles, San Francisco, and a number of California’s great public university beach towns. Every time I stop in Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz, I feel that New Zealand’s missed out by not putting a university in a seaside town like Napier or New Plymouth.
Not everything about California is great, but I definitely think that the state does coastlines right. I’m always struck by the sheer variety along the coastal highway. There are many good white-sand beaches and dunes – we went surfing at one near San Luis Obispo – that are packed with Californians at this time of year. But there are also sections with coastal redwoods and dramatic rocky cliffs, such as Big Sur and the coast north of San Francisco. Here’s one photo I took en route:
Rather than try to describe the California coast in detail, I’m going to rely on Douglas Adams’ description from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book in his Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy. It’s incomparably better than anything I could come up with:
The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds of miles of coastline that first runs west from Los Angeles, which is described in the new edition of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as “junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what’s that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo”, and in another, written only hours later as “being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow.”
The coastline runs west, and then turns north up to the misty bay of San Francisco, which the Guide describes as a “good place to go. It’s very easy to believe that everyone you meet there is also a space traveller. Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying ‘hi’. Until you’ve settled in and got the hang of the place it is best to say ‘no’ to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of.” The hundreds of curling miles of cliffs and sand, palm trees, breakers and sunsets are described in the Guide as “Boffo. A good one.”
Finally, one thing I like about travelling around California is the density and diversity of destinations. Although the state is only around 60% larger than New Zealand, it’s home to almost 39 million people. This undoubtedly feels a bit crowded at times. But it also means that when you’re travelling between places, as we were doing on California 1, you will pass through a number of other interesting places on the way. Everywhere is on the road to somewhere else.
Processing...
I saw some cracking good sea lions at Newport Beach when I was there in 2009. Good times indeed on the California coast.
We stopped to see an elephant seal colony a bit north of Santa Barbara. Elephant seals are totally fucking bizarre is all I’ll say.
We do have a university in one of our great beach cities; Dunedin.
I’m from Dunedin. And it’s not the same. UC Santa Barbara would be like having a university on Lawyer’s Head in Dunedin (or for a better and more Auckland oriented analogy, the headland between Cheltenham and Narrow Neck). A 2 minute stroll down to the beach between classes, but set well out of town. And absolutely nothing (save an access road, cycle path and walking path) between the university and the cliffs over the sea. UCLA is probably more comparable to Dunedin(a decent but direct 20-30 minute bus-ride from the beach).
Cheers for explanation.
It’s a pretty remarkable site. I’ve maybe slightly overestimated the shortness of the walk, but if you’re in the right building, or want a swim in the lagoon, it probably is pretty much 2 minutes. There is also the onsite residential buildings just out of sight to the right of the lagoon in this picture.
http://express.ece.ucsb.edu/pictures/aerial_campus2.html
UC Santa Barbara – “a bitchin education dude!”
The Pacific Coast Highway 1 is one of the most stunning drives. Best experienced in an open top car, of course. Perhaps a Tesla convertible?
Tesla do not do rag tops
I just did the same drive with a friend. We shared a 1971 and a 2012 Porsche 911. It is very nice in the summer California weather but the speed limits are stupidly too low. 55mph is a joke, it should be 70. Doing this on a bike would be insane, its 35c and if you want to ride hundreds of miles in that heat you are a fool.
Enjoy your travels! Personally I’m a big fan of travelling even further north along Hwy 101 into Oregon; there’s some pretty spectacular coastline up there too. Great for cycle touring too, including dynamic warning signs at tunnels and bridges. I was always pretty intrigued though by some of the incredibly huge bridges crossing river mouths at what were rather small towns.
Fed Highway fund!
Ask Kent where he went to University.
ooo I like guessing games. I’m guessing UC Santa Barbara?!?
My girlfriend and I biked from Vancouver airport to the Mexico border in May/June this year. The bicycle infrastructure on Highway 101 and Highway 1 was quite surprising. Cyclist warning lights on tunnels, extensive cycle lanes in cities, mostly good shoulders and above all very polite and considerate drivers.
We only caused one accident when, in a similar situation to here, on a section of Highway 1 with no shoulder, a car overtook us into oncoming traffic. The oncoming car, probably not used to avoiding oncoming cars like they are in NZ, promptly shit himself and locked up the brakes. This abrupt manoeuvre promptly sent him into the ditch on the side of the road where he bounced around a little, made some loud panel damage noises, before he regained the road and drove off suitably chastened (and probably cursing cyclists and not the car that tried to drive into him).
Fairfax, a small town just before San Francisco was just a delight to ride through, with signed cycle routes and sharrows through the whole town (not surprising as it’s the only town that votes Green in the US); Santa Barbara was also outstanding and after initial trepidation, the city of angels all the way down to San Diego had significant sections on the beach, the rest with separated cycle lanes and wide shoulders.
New Zealand certainly has a lot to learn.
I’d be interested in doing a similar trip. How did you find the temperatures for cycling at that time of year? And was there any particular reason you cycled north-south or do you think either direction would work?
North South is easier because downhill. I so much want to do that trip!
We rode mid-May to the end of June and the temperatures were cool until the last week in So Cal. The rest of the coast has sea fog most days until late morning. When the coast road went inland for short distances there was a very noticeable rise in temperatures. So much so that we ran into lots of people escaping the inland heat by coming down to the coast.
By cool, I mean lucky to reach 20 C cool and too cool to swim in the very cool ocean.
The predominant wind is from the North hence most people ride North to South, although we ran into several people riding South to North…
Camping is very good in State Parks and they mostly have hiker/biker sites which cost around $5-6 per person per night. We used the Bicycling the Pacific Coast guide from about half way so we could get our days right for our flight. This is an oldish book but we found it still very relevant and quite current.
The wild life is fantastic and we spent evenings in our camp chairs drinking wine and watching Gray Whales breaching. Lots and lots of sea otters in California, Elephant seals, Bald Eagles…