Central Coast Road Trip // Fall 2021
Well… been a while!
I might have things to catch up on. The insanity of our modern times demands reflection, and I’ve been mostly reflecting privately. But for now, I’ve been living a very similar story to other people my age/class/profession. WFH since March 2020. An extremely careful year spent getting deliveries and taking walks in masks. Adjustments made such as drive-ins, patio hangs, parking lots turned into dining rooms, beach and park days. Lysol. Animal Crossing. Watching Dodger games in a makeshift beer garden, the high five with a stranger after the World Series win being the only time I touched anyone other than my husband for over a year. Partying like hell on November 7. A vaccine and its promise. And a slow return to, if not normalcy, more of the things we missed in 2020. There’s obviously a lot more here, but that’s the short version.
During all this, we hadn’t traveled too far afield - San Diego, Palm Springs twice, and Santa Barbara for my birthday weekend. Easy driving trips, Airbnbs, outdoor dining. We’ve made some other travel plans for more large-scale trips (on planes!), and in the meantime I had a few Central Coast destinations on my wishlist for 2021. I grew up going to the Bay Area and Monterey, but I hadn’t been on the Monterey Peninsula for probably 20 years and felt like it would be great to plan a trip around there and the other destinations I wanted to check out.
It had been years since I planned a proper roadtrip and this one had a lot fewer details, but it’s a unique style of travel that involves more planning than most trips. Figuring out an itinerary and packing a little lighter, moving on from lodgings quickly, and generally just not having that much time in any given location. I wished we could have stayed longer everywhere, and as much as we packed in, there were still things we missed. But a road trip is meant to be a sampler platter, not an entree.
Day 1: Santa Cruz
The whole trip was conceptualized around visiting a brewery whose beers we love, Humble Sea. In the pandemic, we’d come to do regular hauls at our local bottle shop, Hop Merchants, and we noticed Humble Sea’s hazy IPAs were consistently excellent. We offhandedly talked about going up to their Santa Cruz outpost, which then turned into “Well, why couldn’t we actually do this?” It’s about a 5-hour drive to Santa Cruz if you leave in the morning, not the most pleasant drive but being there by lunchtime was extremely satisfying. We enjoyed a couple of brews on their spacious patio, taking our time and getting some pizza from a nearby shop. We also bought some cans to bring home. Then we headed to Natural Bridges State Beach ($10 day use parking or free street parking), a small beach with a natural arch rock formation - the first of many rock formations we saw in the region. Then, we took a slow drive down the coast to the boardwalk, stopping at a lighthouse which turned out to be a museum of surfing. All the rides were closed at the boardwalk, but it was fine. We saw seals on the pier.
We didn’t want to be constantly packing up and moving accommodations, so we picked a couple of Airbnbs as home bases to stay at for a couple of days each. The first was a guest house of a mid century modern Redwood near Pebble Beach, and honestly, the Monterey Peninsula isn’t exactly rife with Airbnb options. Despite splurging on the Airbnbs, we barely spent time in either one. Oh well!
After heading to downtown Pacific Grove, we sought out somewhere to watch the wildcard NLCS game (Dodgers v Cards). Part of the appeal of Monterey over, say, Sedona, was that COVID sensibilities would be similar to Los Angeles, and we’ve been way more comfortable sticking with outdoor dining. Somehow, we happened upon a sports bar with an outdoor patio and TV, with sound on! And even better, the Dodgers won.
Day 2: Big Sur/Monterey
This was my favorite day of the trip and we packed in so much. Big Sur pulls you in from the drive, when rounding every corner makes you gasp, and even though it’s at least 45 minutes from Monterey it feels like part of the journey. We did:
Pfeiffer Beach ($12 parking) - So the first thing we noticed about planning stuff to do in Big Sur was that everything is named after Julia Pfeiffer. Kind of confusing when you’re planning a trip, but after sifting through many badly-written/sometimes incorrect reviews on Yelp and Google, I managed to piece together what the differences were. Pfeiffer Beach is, unsurprisingly, a beach which had somehow slipped past my family’s awareness growing up - probably because of the additional parking fee. Set back a couple of miles on a one-lane dirt road, the semi-treacherous drive was worth it for the end result of arch rock formations, driftwood, a secluded feel, and silvery-purple sand. It wasn’t a place I’d spend hours and hours but it was lovely and if you were so inclined, you could have a pleasant picnic or chilly beach day there, perhaps with a kite.
Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park ($10 for a State Park day parking pass) - This is the Big Sur State Park and if you can only do one thing, it’s this. I’d been as a kid and remembered the redwoods and the creeks. You could spend hours here and while we didn’t have that kind of time, I definitely put on my water socks and got knee-deep into the freezing cold stream. We walked and hiked around, dipped our toes into the water, saw birds, and wished for binoculars. If we’d had more time maybe we would have gone to the swimming hole. Next time!
Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park/McWay Falls ($10 for a State Park day parking pass) - Told ya everything was named after Pfeiffer! Confusingly, this is a state park a little further south which mainly functions as a way to see a waterfall that falls directly on the beach. A gorgeous scene to be sure, but not necessarily worth a special trip if time is tight.
Nepenthe - A very beautiful, very famous restaurant. Possibly a tourist trap, definitely one of the only options, probably still worth experiencing at least once. Service was quick and friendly (they want to churn you through, I reckon) and the food was pretty good, for prices that seem insane but in that setting you just shrug and sign the check instead of thinking about how their burger costs more than the one at Father’s Office. We also enjoyed a terrible Mai Tai. And I do mean enjoyed.
Drive-bys of the Henry Miller Library (new life goal is to see a show here) and the Bixby Canyon Bridge, all with a region-specific soundtrack.
The long day in Big Sur tired us out, but we still managed to see a few key spots on the 17 Mile Drive before scooting back to Pacific Grove and seeing Lover’s Point, a spot I remembered from our visits there as a kid. We grabbed dinner at a brewery in a converted train station and got some really good cocktails elsewhere before heading back.
Day 3: Paso Robles
Somehow, we’d never been to Paso - if we feel like visiting a wine region and can’t get to Napa, we have Temecula and the Santa Ynez Valley a lot closer. Alas, here we experienced one of the sad pitfalls of a road trip, which is that sometimes you just blow through town and don’t have much time to really explore. We got on the road from Monterey early enough to get lunch at Tin City, which is a multi-building industrial complex of breweries, wineries, and restaurants. We hit BarrelHouse Brewing and the namesake Tin City cidery and wished we could have had much more time there, since there was so much to see (much like a more expansive Los Olivos). We had a tasting at Sculpterra which was very nice, and then got to explore the grounds and taste grapes straight off the vine.
Nearing sundown, we headed to Sensorio, a light exhibit in the rolling hills. I was poorly attired for the wind and for some reason we’d spent extra for early admission, which was mostly pointless as the lights didn’t start turning on until later. Nonetheless, once they did start turning on it was a breathtaking scene that had my photos looking like something from someone far more technically skilled than I am. Once we’d taken enough pictures, we headed to dinner in downtown Paso Robles and still had to drive to our next Airbnb 30 minutes away. It was an Airbnb Plus, which meant there were scones.
Day 4: Morro Bay/SLO
In the morning’s light, the Airbnb’s private patio was a nice place to have a coffee and breakfast. We had a slow morning and eventually made our way to the Madonna Inn, basically just to take a few pictures. After that, we headed to Morro Rock, another place I’d never once visited! We saw otters in the bay, explored around the rock, and hung out on the beach where we got playfully chided by Giants fans (we were 1 game into the NLDS). Then we explored the wetlands of Morro Bay State Park and went back into the main drag to grab late lunch and a beer.
By sheer coincidence, some of my extended family happened to be visiting the area at the same time, so we headed over to their rental to caravan to Montaña de Oro State Park. With bluffs, steep cliffs, chaparral, and tide pools, it was such a lovely scene to catch up with my cousins and their kiddos. We also saw a raccoon.
At night, we had probably the nicest dinner of the trip at Granada Bistro. Great drinks. We thought about trying to go to a bar but it was a Saturday night in a college town, so we took a slow walk back and only got a little bit lost.
Final Day: Pismo & the Slow Drive Home
Not a ton to say about this day - we packed up and got breakfast sandwiches at Beachin’ Biscuits. There was a hell of a wait even with an online order, and with good reason - these breakfast sandwiches were AMAZING. We took them over to the beach to eat, then walked on the pier. There’s a famous place called Old Town Cinnamon Rolls which we really wanted to try, but truly didn’t have the stomach space.
We then slowly made our way south, and decided to stop in Los Olivos and enjoy the grassy patio at Figueroa Mountain. Then we ambled down the 101 to Ventura and stopped at the In-N-Out right off the freeway, and finally got home at a reasonable hour.
Stray Observations
Our refrain of the trip was “We’re outdoorsy!” Traditionally, we’ve been more into cities - taking transit, trying as many bars and restaurants as possible, visiting museums and culturally enduring locations . With COVID, the idea of having one of those old-fashioned nights somewhere unfamiliar seems unappealing, unless we’ve done some heavy-duty planning, so shifting to locations where it’s easy to be outside in your own space is, for the moment, the way to go. Spending a day in athleisure and showing up to a restaurant (for lunch) that way? Not my typical style. But I guess this is just the domain of us outdoorsy types, baby.
My IG likes correlated to my enjoyment of each location: Big Sur > Santa Cruz > Paso > SLO > Monterey
Despite the whirlwind, I don’t think this was too much to fit into the time frame. We covered a lot of ground and got some ideas for what to spend more time exploring next. I think a proper Paso Robles trip is probably in order!