California

The Golden State‘s Central Coast has inspired generations of Americans, including the Beach Boys and John Steinbeck. Time Out takes a road trip to appreciate the region‘s spectacular scenery

From a table at Lucia’s, a roadside restaurant teetering high up on the cliffs of Big Sur, it’s difficult to tell where the deep blue of the sky meets the Pacific waters far below. You can sit out on the shaded veranda here, drinking in the vista while you tuck into the house speciality, a burger topped with a dozen roasted garlic cloves. The smog-laden sprawl of LA might be only a few hours’ drive away but the clock keeping time on California’s beautiful Central Coast ticks at a much slower pace.

Nowhere demonstrates this better than Big Sur. It was Spanish missions of the eighteenth century who named this still sparsely-populated and ravine-strewn region ‘el pais grande del sur’, meaning ‘the big country of the south’. Made up of eight national parks and just three small hamlets, the area is best visited in spring or autumn, when traffic is light and there’s little fog to cloak the stunning views. The one major road through Big Sur is Highway 1, one of America’s most scenic. Contrasting sharply with the tailbacked gridlock of LA’s ten-lane freeways, Highway 1 weaves and swoops around hairpin bends, down to sea level and then back up, over gravity-defying bridges 1,000 feet high in the air.

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It’s no surprise that artists, writers and musicians have long been drawn to this timeless landscape, and its influence has been woven into their work. Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played the Big Sur Folk Festivals of the 1960s; in the same decade the Beach Boys sang of the area’s ‘cashmere hills filled with evergreens, flowin’ down from the clouds to meet the sea’. Back in the 1920s, the poet Robinson Jeffers was perhaps the first to interpret the Central Coast’s unique charms for a wider audience. Relatively unknown in the UK, Jeffers is allegedly Charles Bukowski’s favourite poet. Jeffers built his own rough-hewn house at Carmel – literally lugging the enormous stones into place single-handedly. You can book an excellent tour around Tor House (www.torhouse.org) and the adjoining Hawk Tower, where virtually every nook, stone and cranny has a story attached to it, from a shard of green found at nearby Jade Cove to a salvaged tile from a tumbledown Spanish mission. Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac were other literary luminaries lured to the elemental beauty of these parts, and the Henry Miller Memorial Library provides an atmospheric arts space.

Hit the road: it's all just a few hours' drive from smoggy LA (image © Stuart Robertson)

John Steinbeck was born inland, in the pancake-flat Salinas valley. These fertile plains are now entirely in the hands of ‘Big Ag’ (the giant farms that characterise modern American agribusiness); exactly the huge-scale farming Steinbeck railed against in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, in which he depicted the plight of poor sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Ironically, the Steinbeck Centre in Salinas town (www.steinbeck.org) is part funded by Big Ag money, much to the relish of the dedicated curators. Nevertheless, Steinbeck would surely have approved of the brilliant interactive exhibition inspired by his books there. For diehard fans, the house he grew up in, and the cemetery he and his relatives (some of whom appear in ‘East of Eden’) are buried in, are both nearby.

In life, at least, Steinbeck didn’t stick around in Salinas, but he did spend many years not far away in Monterey, on the coast and just north of the chocolate-box charms of its twin, Carmel, a town which deems itself too picturesque to install traffic lights and street signs. Steinbeck had a house in the neighbourhood of Pacific Grove, which feels more like John Irving’s east coast Garp country with its pastel-painted clapboard houses decorously facing the ocean. Up the road is the tourist-infested Cannery Row – once the heart of Monterey’s sardine-canning industry. Steinbeck wrote about it in the novel of the same name, but Cannery Row has become a sanitised (and de-sardinised) theme park version of itself, with gift shops and faux-vintage shrimp joints. Cannery Row’s saving graces are its remaining gantries and warehouses and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, deservedly ranked as one of the world’s finest.

Lucia's overlooking the cliffs of the Big Sur

South of Monterey’s bustle and Big Sur’s temperate breezes is classy Santa Barbara. Along with Pismo Beach, Ventura and Oxnard, it’s a great acclimatisation post between the wilds of Big Sur and the breakneck speed of LA; if you can justify it, it’s worth holing up in the Four Seasons’ Biltmore, a grand old 1920s dame of a hotel set in luscious, carefully-tended grounds on the seafront. The staff seem to move silently on oiled casters, while the guests are of the long-limbed WASP variety associated with ‘The OC’. It’s in the rarified Montecito area, the Bel-Air of this town, where celebrities (including our own John Cleese) hide away among the gently swaying palms. Montecito has been a retreat from Hollywood since before the talkies: Charlie Chaplin’s place is now the Montecito Inn.

Turn inland on Highway 246 towards the Santa Ynez valley and the mercury rises sharply. This is wine country; the lesser-known sister valley to northern California’s Napa. In recent years, the area and its local pinots have found international fame through the offbeat comedy film ‘Sideways’. Print a ‘Sideways’ map from the internet to follow in their steps (www.foxenvineyard.com). Round off a day of tasting with a steak (and more wine) at Buellton’s Hitching Post II, another location in the film. Solvang is the ideal base for exploring the valley. Originally settled by a Danish community in 1911 (the name means ‘Sunny Fields’), the town has gradually morphed into a Denmark as drawn by Disney, with twee, timbered houses, pastry-laden bakeries and steeples with clocks which you’re surprised keep time. High above a grazing bison, raptors wheel slowly on the thermals. Where the empty road flattens out, a man and his dog make painstaking progress in the blistering heat.

Clutching an empty plastic bag, he claims he’s picking up litter. A dot glimpsed far away in the heat haze becomes a beaten-up flatbed truck. As it roars by a girl leans out ofthe window and yells, ‘Hello humans!’ This, the US’s most populous state, feels anything but.

It’s common to reduce California to a lazy shorthand: the diet-obsessed of Muscle Beach; the IT geeks of Silicon Valley; Hollywood’s A-listers; and ‘The Governator’ in charge of them all. But this is not even half the story of what the ‘Golden State’ has to offer – and its real artistic, cultural and recreational heart lies in the magical Central Coast.

Getting there An open jaw return, flying from Gatwick into LA and back from San Francisco costs £387.50 until Oct 5 with Continental Airlines (see www.just theflight.com; www.continental.com/uk).
For car hire try Avis (www.avis.co.uk).

Staying at
The Biltmore Four Seasons Resort 1260 Channel Drive, Santa Barbara (805 969 2261/www.fourseasons.com/santabarbara).
Hearst Castle off Hwy 1, San Simeon (805 927-2020/www.hearstcastle.org).
Petersen Village Inn 1576 Mission Drive, Solvang (805 688-3121/ www.peterseninn.com).
Pine Inn Ocean Ave & Lincoln Lane, Carmel-on-Sea (www.pineinn.com).
Solvang Inn & Cottages, 1518 Mission Drive, Solvang (805 688-4702/ www.solvanginn.com).

For more information visit California Tourism (www.gocalif.ca.gov).

Kate Riordan