Golden Gate and Pacific Coast Highway

Sunday started very early for us as we were facing a long drive from SF to Santa Barbara with a lots of interesting things to see. The alarm woke us already at 6.20 and after a considerably feeding breakfast we jumped into the car. Although our main direction was about 550km south, we started towards north first. In the first days we didn’t have the chance to really get close to the Golden Gate and we wanted to have a great look at it, so we drove about 30km right next to it. Thanks to the great weather again, we got some really nice pictures.

After the quick stop our next destination was the Pacific Coast Highway, also known as Cabrillo Hwy that runs at some points right at the Pacific coast and it’s very well known as one of the most beautiful roads to drive. There was no doubt about that. There were a lot of people like us stopping several times at various turnouts to take photos.. Despite the amazing landscape and views the ride didn’t go without any problems. Due to a mud and stone slide the road was closed after around 250km. We had seen the signs informing the passengers about that but we kept determined going and believed that there would be a detour possibility. We weren’t the only ones who believed so and among others we had to drive 80km back to reach the nearest way to the freeway heading south. So that was about 2 hours extra driving but thanks to great views it was certainly not pointless :) We also found a great restaurant on the way in which we had lunch on the terrace looking at the Pacific!

After a long day we arrived in Santa Barbara at 7pm. The last hours went pretty smoothly on the freeway and we even happened to drive close to the beach at sundown. On the way we also drove through Solvang, a small Danish village in the middle of California :) The whole architecture was just like in Denmark and most if its inhabitants are originally from Denmark.. We had no clue about our hotel in Santa Barbara, we just reserved some place the day before, but we were very positively surprised by it. It’s by far the best hotel we’ve been staying so far. The Sandman Inn is quite big with two pools and a Jacuzzi. We had reserved a small room with two queen beds but we got really big two-bedroom room. We’ll spend the day here before continuing to LA tomorrow. Hopefully the weather stays as good as today so that we could hang at beach for a while.