Drive the Pacific Coast Highway for 1,650 miles on an epic West Coast road trip from Washington to California with this planning guide. Cross-Country Adventures on America's Two-Lane Highways ... US-101 transitions into scenic Highway 1, the most popular portion of this route and the classic Coastal California road trip. For some reason, when ...

Rarely losing sight of the Pacific Ocean during its 340-mi (545-km) jaunt along the Oregon coast, US-101 winds past rockbound coast, ancient forests, and innumerable towns and villages. While the region also has its share of strip towns and places where the timber boom went bust, the beach loops, historic restorations, and more state parks per ...

Long Beach. Directly south of downtown Los Angeles, the city of Long Beach (pop. 462,257) is the second-largest of LA’s constituent cities, but it feels more like the Midwest than the cutting-edge West Coast. Long Beach is probably best known as the home of the cruise ship RMS Queen Mary (877/342-0742, tours $27), one of the largest and most luxurious liners ever to set sail.

At the midpoint of the California Coast sits San Francisco, deservedly ranked among the world’s favorite cities. The 150 miles (241 km) of coast stretching south from San Francisco hold numerous remnants of the Spanish and Mexican eras, exemplified by the town of Monterey and the beautiful mission at Carmel , and the wild, rugged coastline of ...

Santa Cruz. The popular beach resort and college town of Santa Cruz (pop. 64,725) sits at the north end of Monterey Bay, a 90-minute drive from San Francisco, at the foot of a 3,000-foot-high ridge of mountains. It’s best known for its Boardwalk amusement park, which holds the oldest surviving wooden roller coaster on the West Coast, and for the large University of California campus in the ...

Malibu. South of Zuma Beach, houses begin popping up along Hwy-1 to block the oceanfront views, and more-elaborate multimillion-dollar homes dot the canyons above as well, forming the sprawling exurbia and movie-star playground of Malibu, which stretches along Hwy-1 en route to Santa Monica and metropolitan Los Angeles. Unless TV helicopters are flying overhead to document the latest wildfire ...

A coastal Florida road trip along the Atlantic runs from the Georgia border to Key West. Find tips and driving distances in Florida here. ... offering only rare glimpses of the open ocean. In between I-95 and Hwy-A1A runs historic US-1, part of the old Dixie Highway, which is lined by reminders of Florida’s rich roadside heritage but which ...

From Malibu and Topanga Canyon, Hwy-1 swoops along the shore, running along the beach as far as the landmark Santa Monica Pier before bending inland through a tunnel and metamorphosing quite unexpectedly into the I-10, the Santa Monica Freeway. ... one of the busiest on the West Coast. ...

Starting at splendid Port Townsend, US‑101 loops west around the rugged Olympic Peninsula, passing near the northwesternmost point of the continental United States while allowing access to the unforgettable natural attractions—sandy, driftwood-strewn beaches; primeval old-growth forests; and pristine mountain lakes and glaciated alpine ...

Running right along the beach, the Pacific Coast Highway (Hwy-1) heads south from Oxnard around the rocky headland of Point Mugu (pronounced “ma-GOO”), where the U.S. Navy operates a missile testing center and the Santa Monica Mountains rise steeply out of the Pacific Ocean. Most of these chaparral-covered granite mountains have been protected as parkland, with hiking, cycling, and riding ...