Monterey to LA, California, USA

North America

24 Sept

Written By Harriet Fisher

Highlights

Monterey
Highway 1
Cambria
Santa Barbara
Los Angeles
Santa Monica

Why visit the Californian coast?

For dramatic ocean drives, fantastic views, and relaxing family time at the seaside.

Getting there and around

In September 2022 we hired a medium estate car from Avis (cost - £70 per day including fuel, additional driver and car seats).

After visiting Yosemite we drove to the coast and made our way southwards stopping at Monterey, Cambria, Santa Barbara and Santa Monica.

We mainly used our car to get around as sadly many American cities and towns aren’t very walkable. In Santa Barbara we walked from our hotel to the beach, but we drove to the town centre. In Santa Monica we walked around the local area but drove to Universal Studios.

Data

We topped up our Airalo e-sim, with another 5GB for £10 to last us to the end of our stay in the USA.

Accommodation

Stage Coach Lodge, Monterey

The Stage Coach Lodge was a motel 10 minutes drive from the town centre. There was an unheated pool that was too cold to swim in. There was also a coin operated laundry. We stayed in a very spacious room with two queen beds, sofa, air con, dining table and kitchenette with fridge and microwave for 2 nights. At £150 per night, the motel was excellent value for money and we highly recommended it.

Our star rating: 3

Our cost rating: 4

Cambria Pines Lodge

Cambria Pines Lodge consisted of motel style rooms set in gardens. There was an outdoor heated pool. We stayed for 2 nights in a forest view two queen room which had no air con. The breakfast was disappointing and the dining room was crowded and dirty. The plumbing broke and our water was switched off. At £260 a night we felt that Cambria Pines didn’t reach the standard we’d expect.

Our star rating: 2

Our cost rating: 1

Monterey

After our Yosemite visit and long car journeys, the kids were ready for an easy day of outdoor play. The Dennis the Menace playground really delivered! It had lots of different areas with multiple climbing frames, slides, tunnels, swings, bridges and natural obstacles like rocks to clamber on.

Just across the road from the Dennis the Menace playground, we spent the afternoon at the Del Monte beach. It was flat and fairly clean with golden sand and the freezing cold Pacific Ocean! The kids had a great time jumping waves, searching for shells and burying each other in the sand.

We visited Cannery Row in the evening and walked along the sea front. The Cannery Row statue is cool, featuring a mix of ordinary and famous people (including John Steinbeck) and made a change from the typical military or presidential monument.

Highway 1

We drove from Monterey to Cambria. The drive required concentration but because the speeds were low and we are well used to driving hilly country roads in the UK, it wasn’t particularly daunting. The drive took us 4 hours including stops.

We travelled via Pebble Beach, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Big Sur and San Simeon. The communities we went through seemed to be wealthy and exclusive neighbourhoods with a marked difference from the poverty we saw in San Francisco.

We had planned to stop at Point Lobos and Bixby Bridge but both car parks were full. There were plenty of other safe places to pull over and take photos though, and the views throughout the whole drive were spectacular.

We ate lunch at Nepenthe, opting for their Cafe Kevah on the lower terrace. This was a fabulous spot for lunch, perched high on a cliff above the ocean with gorgeous views. We enjoyed our food (caprese baguettes for the adults and quasadillas for the kids). It was good quality and pricey but worth it.

Cambria

Cambria was a pleasant place to stay for a couple of nights. We enjoyed walking around the shops and thought that it was a sweet little town - upmarket, quiet and peaceful.

We ate dinner at Robin’s Restaurant. It had an interesting menu and friendly service. It was a relief to see salads and vegetables on the menu and to not have a limited choice between just hamburgers and chicken! The kids options were good too. We didn’t mind paying a bit more than we normally would for such a nice meal.

At the coast, Moonstone Beach is a sandy beach with driftwood and a boardwalk to promenade and watch the surfers. 20 minutes up the coast north of Cambria, just outside of San Simeon, is an elephant seal rookery on the beach, home to 20,000 seals! These creatures slowly wriggling up and down the beach and covering themselves in sand to keep cool was meditative to watch. They look dead in the photo but they were just lazing on the beach!

Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara is a coastal city sitting between the Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific. Originally home to 25,000 Chumash Native Americans, the town was colonised by Spanish missionaries and soldiers in the late eighteenth century. The town’s street names and adobe architecture take on clear Spanish influences.

Downtown

This was a lovely town well worth spending a few days in. We thought the architecture and shopping malls were beautifully designed. We felt safe and at ease walking around both the town centre and the area where our hotel was located which was quiet and peaceful.

The city had great shops and amenities and we got lots of errands done here like haircuts, posting some mail, and using the bank. Our favourite meals here were healthy rice and veg bowls at the Blue Owl, and amazing tacos at Lilly’s Taqueria.

Beach and Wharf

West Beach was clean and quiet when we were there. The kids had fun building sand castles and chasing waves. We had the whole beach to ourselves as local kids were at school. Chad’s Cafe was great for brunch.

MOXI

We spent half a day at the Museum of Exploration and Innovation (MOXI). This was a beautifully built museum in the town’s vernacular white adobe style.

The top floor was a lovely roof space with great views of the city and hills beyond.

The kids particularly enjoyed the ‘create anything’ workshop with tools and glue guns where they worked together to make a pirate ship; and the gaming arcade where they made their own video game characters and platform terrains.

Los Angeles

Getty Centre

On the way from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica we stopped at the Getty Centre which is an art museum founded by the J Paul Getty Trust (the Getty family made their money from oil and later Getty images). The Getty was free to visit but tickets must be booked in advance and parking was £17.

A very efficient cable-pulled hover train takes visitors up the hill to the Centre where there are amazing views of Los Angeles. The building design is magnificent. We walked around the gardens and took in the views.

In our view, the Getty Centre isn’t really designed for or orientated towards children, which is fine - not everywhere can or should be. It’s quiet and tranquil and really a place for grown-ups to enjoy. We chose to focus on the architecture, views and outdoor spaces and didn’t attempt to see the indoor art this time, but had we been kid-free it would have been wonderful to soak it all in properly.

The kids were disappointed that the azalea maze was just to look at and wasn’t a maze they could go through. In fact the whole place was full of things that seem enticing to kids (boulders, streams, stepping stones) but were off limits.

It was a useful reminder that as parents it’s not worth promising anything in case it can’t be delivered! However, we all agreed that the gardens were beautiful, the building was stunning, and the sculptures and cacti roof garden were very cool.

Universal Studios

We spent a very full and very hot (32 degrees) day at Universal Studios Hollywood. The majority of the rides were immersive motion-based rides rather than rollercoasters. We all enjoyed the Minions, Simpsons and Transformers rides.

Max was too short for the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride, and a good thing too because it was quite scary! This was an amazing immersive ride; the queue winds its way through the inside of Hogwarts Castle and was an experience in itself. William loved the ride and went on twice.

The studio tour was great fun. It was cool seeing sets from some of our favourite Spielberg films like Jaws, War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park. We also saw the set from Jordan Peele’s latest movie Nope. The special effects sections of the tour like King Kong, the earthquake, Mexican flash flood and the Fast and the Furious car chase were awesome. Universal was an extremely fun day out.

Santa Monica

The Santa Monica farmer’s market is every Wednesday and Saturday morning. It was a fantastic market for picking up pastries for breakfast and fresh fruit. It seemed like a lot of the produce was organic and locally grown in California.

We thought Santa Monica was a nice place to walk around and the beach was huge. We preferred the beach at Santa Barbara as it was quieter and there were no vendors constantly selling stuff. Having said that, we bought the kids wake boards in Santa Monica and they had a fab time.

Unfortunately Mal’s kidney stones flared up at this point so we didn’t get to do some the things we’d planned for Los Angeles including Echo Park and Griffith Observatory. But one’s health is of course much more important than sightseeing!

Final Thoughts

Our Californian Coastal road trip from Monterey down to LA coincided with a time of reflection as we received the sad news that a family member back in England had died. We took things a little easier while we processed this news.

The pacific coast highway was an epic drive and we enjoyed the small beach town feel of the places we stopped at along the way.

We found that the polarisation of wealth was extreme and visible in this part of California, and probably signals where the UK is sadly headed (at the time of our trip Liz Truss was the short-lived prime minister and Kwarteng’s mini-budget and the rising cost of living were in the news). When we saw poverty and homelessness in California it threw our privilege into perspective, and of course prompted conversations and learning with the children.

Harriet Fisher