Pacific Coast Highway

We drove the famous Pacific Coast Highway, or State Route 1 (SR1), from Los Angeles to San Francisco, in 1997 as part of our USA vacation.

Note This article is part of our USA Retrospective series, featuring images captured on an early generation Kodak DC220 digital camera with 1280x1024 resolution. The images have post processed to artificially increase sharpness. Please forgive us if they do not meet your expectations of photographic quality.

Pacific Coast Highway is famous for many reasons. Well known for the scenic beauty of the coastline, it is one of the Great Drives of the World. Constructed in piecemeal fashion, it is now part of California's Freeway and Expressway system. It has also been featured in popular culture, with both the Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach naming a song after it, and Christopher Franke even wrote an album dedicated to it. It has been featured as a location in many films. The current version of macOS (Big Sur) features Bixby Creek Bridge as a desktop background, and the next version (Monterey) is also based on a well known stopping point on this route.

We drove SR1 from very close to it's start in Los Angeles all the way to San Francisco. Along the way, we stopped at the Solvang, Madonna Inn, Bixby Creek Bridge, Monterey before finishing just before the Golden Gate Bridge at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Solvang is an interesting stopping place. Established by a group of Danes who wanted to establish a community, it has continued to develop as a themed town and now calls itself the "Danish Capital of America." It even contains a replica of the Little Mermaid statue and the Round Tower from Copenhagen.

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The Madonna Inn is a famous landmark featuring over 100 uniquely designed and theme hotel rooms. The pseudo Swiss Alps exterior design is predominantly pink. Although we did not stay, we were allowed to peek inside (but not take photos) of some of the rooms., and they are truly fascinating.

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Of course, we had to stop at the beautiful and majestic Bixby Creek Bridge, also known as Bixby Canyon Bridge, on the Big Sur coast of California. According to Wikipedia, it is one of 'the most photographed bridges in California due to its aesthetic design, "graceful architecture and magnificent setting".'

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We stopped overnight at Monterey, and took an opportunity not only to visit the famous aquarium but some of the historical buildings from the Spanish and Mexican periods. I was quite pleased to find a historic mission bell guidepost marking the El Camino Real, a road linking the Spanish missions all the way to San Francisco. Most people associate El Camino Real as the road linking San Diego to San Francisco across Silicon Valley, but the historic route stretches all the way to Baja California Sur in Mexico.

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We ended our drive at the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District of San Francisco. Originally constructed as part of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in order to exhibit works of art, it was never intended to be permanent and although it was preserved, it eventually became a ruin and was completely demolished in 1964. The present structures are a reconstruction completed in 1974 made using concrete.

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We can see Alcatraz, another famous San Francisco landmark, in the distance.

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#Bixby Creek Bridge #Madonna Inn #Monterey #Palace of Fine Arts #road trip #San Francisco #Solvang #SR1