Laguna Beach to San Francisco

California Highway One

The Road Trip

Saturday August 8th 

If you’re idea of a road trip is to see the whole of America in one week, we recommend booking a tour with the Jodie and Rob USA travel company.  We’ve done 3800 kms in 4 days. Yes, that’s right - three thousand, eight hundred kilometres in four days.   This is how we’ve done it:

Day 1: Pick up your hire car, drive about 5 hours until the sun sets and then sleep in a tent because there’s nowhere else to sleep. Have Mexican at the fabulous Cocina Michoacana restaurant. 

Day 2: Get up at 5am and drive for 15 hours through the Arizona desert. You’ll see Yosemite National Park and end up at Williams, an entry town to the Grand Canyon. Go to the Route 66 cafe for dinner. Go to bed about 11pm. 

Day 3: Get up at 4:45am. Drive to the Grand Canyon for sunrise. Then drive to LA via Sedona and Jerome and over some of the biggest mountain passes you’ve seen in your life. Arrive in LA, after getting lost - your total driving time for that day would be 20 hours in the same day. 

Day 4: Get up at 5am and head North from LA to San Francisco.  Your friends will tell you it takes 8 hours, but you find out it takes about 13 hours. See Elephant Seals, Big Sur, Carmel and eat a packet of blue corn tortilla chips for lunch. 

You must at all times have a large packet of tortilla chips handy, in addition to an unlimited supply of humour and an unprecedented reserve of patience and lastly an overflowing abundance of adventure. It also helps not to criticise each other’s driving styles - we learnt this. The last photo is of elephant seals, they are HUGE! The Lonely Planet guide forgot to mention the SMELL of the seaweed on Highway 1 and also that the seals make very funny noises!!