The Pacific Coast Highway is a drive people put on lists and then treat like a commute. They leave San Francisco after breakfast and try to make Los Angeles by dinner, and they spend the day frustrated that the most beautiful road in America keeps slowing them down. The road is not the problem. The plan is.
Drive northbound — or don’t, but know why
Conventional wisdom says drive north-to-south so you are on the ocean side of the road. The counter-argument, which I hold to, is that southbound puts you in the fast lane and northbound gives you the pull-outs, the slow pace, and the sea filling your windshield at every turn.
Highway 1 through Big Sur is periodically closed by landslides, and Caltrans publishes live road conditions travellers should check before departing. [1]
The stops that matter
- Bixby Creek Bridge — the most photographed span on the coast; arrive early to beat the tripods.
- McWay Falls — an 80-foot waterfall that drops onto a beach you cannot reach, which is somehow the point.
- Pfeiffer Beach — purple-tinged sand and a keyhole rock, down an unmarked road that keeps the crowds away.
- Nepenthe — lunch on a terrace 800 feet above the sea, worth the wait for a table.
You do not drive Big Sur to get somewhere. You drive it to be nowhere in particular, beautifully.
— Mara Ellison
Where to break the drive
Two days beats one, and three beats two. Base a night in Big Sur itself if the budget allows, or Cambria if it does not. For more routes in this spirit, browse our full collection of coastal drives.
Where to Eat
Four Highway 1 stops worth planning your driving day around, from a clifftop icon to a wood-fired roadside bakery.
