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Driving the Pacific Coast Highway:
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The author starts his trip in Port Townsend in Washington, although there is a 3-page guide to Seattle at the start of the book. He then drives around the Olympic Peninsula and down the west coast, winding up in San Diego – which gets a 2-page city guide. The other major cities on the route, Los Angeles and San Francisco, also get treated to city guides, though so too does Portland. In a book this small I'd have left Portland out, as it's quite a ways from the Pacific Coast Highway and hardly makes for a logical diversion. I'd have given the space over to somewhere else on the route – like Santa Monica, which for some reason the author skips altogether.
Oddities and Odd Inclusions
The best parts of the book are the quirky stories the author unearths on the way, and which he obviously enjoys sharing with his readers. They're the kind of stories and sights that make US road trips so great – stories like the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Arcata every Memorial Day Weekend, the chair in the café at the Devil's Punchbowl where Bruce Springsteen sat, and the town of Castroville where Marilyn Monroe was once "Miss Artichoke". We love these stories, and so will you, as they're part of what makes driving the Pacific Coast Highway so great. It's about much more than the dramatic scenery of Big Sur, and the author knows it.
However, there are some other odd inclusions and strange omissions. We've already mentioned the fact that there is nothing at all on Santa Monica, and the author also drives through Forks without mentioning vampires once. Then when he gets south of Los Angeles he goes a bit LA-LA, we feel, with a long entry for Disneyland, and another for the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Now the Library may well be a worthy place, and we mean it no disrespect, but it is about 40 miles from the Pacific Coast Highway and in a book that's under 150 pages, every entry counts. We love Disneyland too, but we don't cover it on this website as to us it isn't part of the essential PCH road trip experience.
Road Trip USA Illustrations
The book is nicely illustrated, with some old photos, like the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, and lots of lovely old-time picture postcards too. There are route maps all along the way, and some special feature spreads on things you'll encounter like El Camino Real and the California Missions, Big Sur, the Avenue of the Giants, and the Olympic National Park.
Apart from our minor complaints, this is a really enjoyable and inexpensive book from an author who clearly, like us, loves driving the Pacific Coast Highway.
It is also available on Amazon USA, at Amazon UK, in bookstores, and at other online booksellers.
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Pacific Coast Highway Travel Books Page
Popular Pages
The most popular pages on Pacific Coast Highway Travel right now are:
Drive the Pacific Coast Highway
Whale Watching in California
Where to Stay on the PCH
Pacific Coast Highway Maps
PCH Hotels Guide
To help you in choosing your Pacific Coast Highway hotel, guesthouse, inn, bed-and-breakfast, resort, motel or other accommodations, we've prepared our Pacific Coast Highway Hotels Guide ebook. In it we do mini-reviews of accommodations along the Highway, from Seattle to San Diego, through Washington, Oregon, and California.
For the 2011 edition we added new hotels, including a special 50-hotel section covering California’s wine country of Napa, Sonoma, and Paso Robles - by far the most popular diversion from the PCH drive. In all there are over 200 hotels listed, complete with 8 pages of color maps showing the towns where our recommended hotels can be found. There are both alphabetical and geographical indexes, helping you plan your journey.
We also include color photos of all the hotels that are our Personal Favorites. Here's the link to
read more about our ebook guide to Pacific Coast Highway hotels
Or you can buy it here for $2.99:
KINDLE EDITION
The Hotels Guide is also available but without the maps and color photos in the US Kindle Store for $4.99 and in the UK Kindle Store at a price based on the US price.
NOOK EDITION
The guide is also available at Barnes and Noble for the Nook.
PAPERBACK EDITION
If you want a printed edition without color photos and with only black and white maps, it costs $8.99 at the Amazon US store.
We've also published our PCH Hotels Guide as an app in the Apple Store.
You can buy it here and
read about it here.
