Ten days on the Pacific Coast Highway: the slow road, taken slowly

Arrive without a car and keep it that way for two days. Everything today is a walk or a short streetcar ride.

The Ferry Building survived the earthquake and fire of 1906 and had a hundred thousand people a day passing through it before the bridges were built. It is a food hall now and the best place in the city to eat on a first afternoon.

Walk northwest into North Beach, which was the Italian quarter and then the Beat one, and then up Telegraph Hill on the stairways that climb the eastern face through gardens and clapboard cottages. Coit Tower at the top was paid for by a woman who spent her life chasing fire engines, and the murals inside the base were painted in 1934 by artists on federal relief.

Finish with the crooked block of Lombard Street, ten minutes west on the ridge, and dinner in North Beach.

The bridge is the reason a lot of people come, and looking at it from a distance is not the same thing. Walk out onto it: the eastern sidewalk is open in daylight, the towers are 227 metres high, and the moment the first one passes overhead and the deck moves slightly under the traffic is what the photographs cannot do.

Going a third of the way out and turning back takes an hour and gets you everything.

In the afternoon, go into the big park on the west side. The Academy of Sciences is four museums in one building, with an aquarium in the basement, a rainforest under a glass dome, a planetarium and a roof planted with seven grass hills that you can walk out onto.

Come back east in the late afternoon for Alamo Square, where the row of 1890s Victorians on Steiner Street has the whole financial district stacked up behind it. The light works after about four.

Collect the car and drive south. It is about 120 miles and two and a half hours on the inland motorway, or three and a half down the coast through Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, which is the better road and the point of the trip.

Arrive in the afternoon and start with the old town, which almost nobody does. Monterey was the capital of Spanish and then Mexican California, and a dozen adobe buildings from the 1830s and 1840s survive in a few blocks, including the customs house that is the oldest government building in the state and the hall where the California constitution was written in 1849.

Then Cannery Row, which was a mile of sardine canneries employing thousands of people until the fish stopped coming in the 1950s. Steinbeck set a novel here and the street now trades comprehensively on it. The buildings are worth the walk even so, and the aquarium at the far end is in one of them.

Dinner on the wharf, which is touristy and has the chowder.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of the two or three best in the world and it earned that by being built for a specific place rather than a general one: everything in it comes from the bay outside, and a submarine canyon deeper than the Grand Canyon starts a couple of miles offshore. The kelp forest tank is three storeys high with an open top so the water surges, and it is the exhibit everybody remembers. Book a timed ticket and go at opening.

In the afternoon, drive the 17-Mile Drive through Pebble Beach, a private toll road looping the peninsula past cypress trees growing out of bare rock, seal colonies and some of the most expensive golf in the world. It takes about an hour and a half with stops.

It ends at Carmel-by-the-Sea, a village of shingled cottages and galleries with no street numbers, no pavements in the residential streets and a white sand beach at the bottom of the hill. Have a drink there and drive back.

Or stay out and watch the sun go down from the beach, which is west-facing and the last one before Big Sur.

Today is the drive. Sixty miles south from Carmel to the Big Sur valley and eleven more beyond it, and if the day takes you less than six hours you have not stopped enough.

The Bixby Bridge is thirteen miles down and is the one on every poster: a single concrete arch from 1933 spanning a gorge three hundred feet deep, built because the alternative was a mountain track that closed every winter. Park on the northern side and walk back out onto it.

Twenty miles further, the valley behind the village is redwood country, cooler and darker than the coast and a good hour out of the wind, with easy trails and a waterfall that runs properly only in spring.

Then carry on south for the one everybody has seen. McWay Falls drops eighty feet straight onto the sand of a cove that nobody is allowed to walk down to, and the overlook is a level five minute path from the car park. Twenty minutes, and unmissable.

Double back north for sunset at Pfeiffer Beach, reached by a narrow lane off the highway with no sign on it, where the sand has a purple cast from manganese garnet and the sun drops through a hole in a sea stack in December and January.

Be at your room before dark. There is almost no phone signal here, no petrol for forty miles, no streetlights, and dinner needs a booking.

The longest driving day: about 255 miles and five or six hours with stops. Fill the tank before you leave the valley.

Below Big Sur the road empties out and the cliffs relax. The beaches down this stretch are the largest on the coast and are usually deserted, with staircases down from the highway and nobody at the bottom of them. Stop at one.

At Piedras Blancas, about ninety miles south, several thousand elephant seals haul out on the sand beside a free boardwalk a few yards off the highway. You can hear them from the car park. The bulls are ashore from December to March and the moulting season fills the beach again in spring and summer.

Hearst Castle is five minutes further on, and it is either two hours well spent or a folly to drive past. If you want it, the tours book weeks ahead.

The road turns inland at Morro Bay and you finish on the 101 through the Santa Ynez hills, dropping into Santa Barbara from the north in the late afternoon. Park the car and walk out onto the wharf for the last of the light.

The town burned in the 1925 earthquake and rebuilt itself under a design ordinance that required white stucco and red tile, which is why the whole of it matches.

The county courthouse is the best building in California that most people have never heard of: a 1929 Spanish Colonial Revival pile with a painted mural room, tiled staircases and a clock tower you can go up for nothing. From the top you get the tile roofs, the mountains behind and the ocean in front in a single turn.

The mission on the hill above the town was founded in 1786 and is the only one of the twenty-one California missions that has been in continuous use by Franciscans since. The twin-towered facade is the postcard and the cemetery and the aqueduct behind are the interesting part.

In the afternoon, drop down to the beach and the harbour. The wharf is the oldest working one in the state, the beach path runs three miles east, and the wine tasting rooms in the converted warehouses behind the sand are where the town actually drinks.

Ninety miles and two hours without traffic, which there will be. Leave by mid morning and stay on the coast road the whole way.

The stretch from Ventura south is the last of the highway doing what it does: the road runs on the sand at Mussel Shoals, past the point breaks at Rincon and County Line, and then along Malibu with the ocean on your right and cliffs of expensive houses on the left for twenty miles.

Come into the city at Santa Monica, where the highway effectively ends. The pier is a wooden one from 1909 with a small amusement park on it, a Ferris wheel that runs on solar power and a plaque marking the western end of Route 66. Leave the car and walk.

In the evening, get inland to a proper dinner. The best food in Los Angeles is almost never near the water.

One full day in Los Angeles, and it has to choose. This one takes the west side in the morning and the hills in the evening, which is the version that best explains the shape of the place.

The Getty Center sits on a ridge above the motorway and you reach it on a driverless tram from the car park below. Travertine quarried in Italy, white enamelled metal, a collection running from illuminated manuscripts to Van Gogh, and gardens laid out down the slope as a work in their own right. Entry is free and parking is not.

In the afternoon go east to Hollywood, which is a pavement lined with souvenir shops and is over in forty minutes. Do it, get the photograph, and move on.

Then up into Griffith Park for the observatory, which is free, Art Deco, built in the 1930s, and has the entire basin laid out below it with the sign standing on the ridge behind. Arrive an hour before sunset, watch the light go west, then turn round and watch the city come on.

Depending on the flight, there is time for one more thing, and downtown is on the way to nowhere in particular but has the best of it.

The top of City Hall is free, weekdays only, and almost always empty, and looks west along Wilshire towards the ocean you have spent nine days driving beside.

Then the airport, half an hour away on a good day and ninety minutes on a Friday afternoon. Return the car with a full tank and more time than you think you need; the rental returns at LAX are their own small city.