After three days in Los Angeles with our teenagers, we were over the jet lag and excited to start the road trip proper. The first leg promised palm-fringed beaches up to Malibu, then a detour inland through the hills to the Danish town of Solvang, before we rejoined the coast at Pismo Beach for the night.
This is the first leg of our 10 day California road trip with teenagers, driving south to north from LA to San Francisco over the UK Easter holidays. Below you’ll find how far the drive is, how long it takes, and the stops that made a long day in the car worth it.
Los Angeles to Pismo Beach is roughly 190 miles, around 3 to 3.5 hours without stops on US-101, traffic permitting. It’s easily doable in a day, but we’d take the slower route: Highway 1 through Malibu, then inland on Highway 154 to Solvang, then US-101 to Pismo Beach, which turns it into a full and very varied day.
Pismo Beach is roughly 190 miles north of Los Angeles. On the direct route, which is mostly US-101, the LA to Pismo Beach drive takes around 3 to 3.5 hours without stops. LA traffic can add a lot to that, so check your route on the day and try to avoid leaving in the weekday rush hour.
The direct route is quick, but you’d miss most of the good bits. This is the route we took instead:
From the airport car hire centres, head north on Highway 1 (the Pacific Coast Highway) through Santa Monica and along the Malibu coast.
Carry on up the coast past Point Mugu. Highway 1 joins US-101 near Oxnard, and the freeway then hugs the shore through Ventura to Santa Barbara.
Turn inland on Highway 154 over the hills, past Cachuma Lake, to Solvang in the Santa Ynez Valley.
From Solvang, it's around an hour up US-101 to Pismo Beach.
With a coffee stop, a long lunch and a wander around Solvang, it took us most of the day. If you’re driving Pismo Beach to Los Angeles instead, the same stops work just as well in reverse.
If you’ve spent a few days in Los Angeles doing touristy things, collecting the hire car feels like the start of a whole new holiday.
In our case, we didn’t get the car we’d booked from AVIS. It’s now a standing joke in our family that we never get the hire car we booked! We were given an older car that smelt strongly of weed whenever the air con was on, and it didn’t have sat nav. We were able to rent a plug-in sat nav, which worked better than expected, and I had a paper road map with me just in case.
From the AVIS rental centre it’s around a 40-minute drive north on Highway 1 to Malibu, depending on traffic. Malibu doesn’t really have a centre as such. It runs for miles along both sides of the highway, with the Pacific on one side and houses in the hills on the other, so you have to go looking for the action.
The historic Malibu Pier is a good place to start looking for a slice of Malibu life. It’s a great spot to stretch your legs after the first stretch of driving, watch people fishing off the end, pick up some Malibu merchandise and grab a coffee from Malibu Farm.
Many of the beaches along this coastline are hidden behind prime ocean-front houses, with the Pacific in front of them and Highway 1 right behind. Look out for the brown Coastal Access signs if you want to get down onto the sand. Zuma Beach is one of the main public beaches in the Malibu area and is much easier to find.
When I first wrote this post, I included a stop at Carbon Beach, often called Billionaire’s Beach, a strip of golden sand lined with the most incredible beach-front houses. The Palisades Fire of January 2025 destroyed many of the houses along this stretch, as well as homes in Pacific Palisades and across Malibu. I’ve left it out as a stop, and if you’re driving through, please be respectful of the people still living with what happened.
Paradise Cove is a lovely little beach with a small pier and an old-fashioned white wooden lifeguard station, and it has a surprising amount of pop culture history. Marilyn Monroe was photographed on the beach early in her career, and the Beach Boys shot the cover of their first album, Surfin’ Safari, here in 1962. There’s a sign marking “the Spot” where the photos were taken, which our teens were more impressed by than they let on.
Fans of old TV will know it as the home of Jim Rockford’s trailer in The Rockford Files, and it has turned up in plenty of films and music videos since, including the final scene of Indecent Proposal.
Overlooking the sand is the Paradise Cove Beach Café, with a big outdoor patio and ocean views, which makes it a perfect lunch stop. Be warned, the plates are huge, so consider sharing if you don’t want a belly-buster meal before getting back in the car. The seagulls are hungry too, and they will swoop if you leave food on your plate while you’re sitting outside.
After lunch and another stroll on the beach, we carried on north along the coast. This stretch threw up a couple of random stops we hadn’t planned at all.
First, we passed a huge sand dune right by the side of the road, with people running and sliding down it as if they were surfing. On the ocean side of the road opposite were hundreds of stacked stone cairns (inukshuks) lined up in front of the sea. They looked lovely against the water and were well worth a quick photo stop. If you spot them, pull over where it’s safe and have a look.
Santa Barbara is a destination in its own right, and we’d love to go back. On this trip we decided to keep driving, as we wanted time in Solvang and a relaxed evening in Pismo Beach. It’s one of those decisions you make on a road trip with only 10 days, and it left us with a good reason to return.
We haven’t been yet, so this is our researched shortlist rather than first-hand advice:
Santa Barbara’s main street runs down towards the sea and is lined with shops, cafés and Spanish-style buildings, which look like a good place for a wander.
The long wooden wharf at the bottom of State Street is the obvious place to stretch your legs and look back at the town and the mountains behind it.
Boats to Channel Islands National Park leave from Ventura Harbor, a little south of Santa Barbara. A day on the islands is top of our list for a future trip, but it needs its own day rather than a quick stop.
If you’re starting from Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara to Pismo Beach is roughly 100 miles, usually under two hours on US-101 without stops, so it’s a relaxed half-day drive with time for Solvang on the way.
Just after Santa Barbara, turn off US-101 onto Highway 154 and head inland towards Solvang. The road climbs into hilly, almost mountainous landscape, which was pretty and unexpected. I don’t know why I’d pictured this part of California as flat, because it absolutely isn’t.
It’s around 1 hour 45 minutes from Paradise Cove to Solvang without stops, so Cachuma Lake makes a good pitstop to stretch your legs. We made sure to stick to the paths on our short walk, as there were rattlesnake warning signs around the area. A bird of prey circled overhead the whole time we were there, clearly looking for its own lunch.
Eventually you arrive in Solvang, a town founded by Danish settlers in the early 1900s. The buildings are all Northern European in style, so much so that it almost feels like a film set rather than a real town.
Solvang is full of all things Danish:
Clogs and flags: Souvenir shops sell clogs in every size, and Danish flags hang from the buildings.
Bakeries: Danish pastries are everywhere, and it would be rude not to try one.
The Little Mermaid: There's a replica of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue in a fountain in town.
Windmills: The windmill is the photo everyone takes, and there are a few others around town.
Hans Christian Andersen: There's a museum dedicated to the fairy tale author, which helps explain the nickname, the Danish Capital of America.
Solvang made an interesting diversion from the coast, and it meant we drove through the rolling farmland and vineyards of the Santa Ynez Valley, which we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
From Solvang, pick up US-101 (the inland freeway, not the Pacific Coast Highway) for the final run of around an hour to Pismo Beach.
We stayed at the Vespera Resort on Pismo Beach, part of Marriott, and once we’d checked in we went out for a look around and some dinner. If you collect Marriott Bonvoy points, it’s worth checking this one on points (our guide to travel reward points explains how we use them).
There’s a small pier right by the hotel with a Pismo Beach sign that lights up as it gets dark. The town seemed alive with teenagers and younger kids on holiday, meeting up and enjoying a bit of freedom from their parents, while the parents had a glass of wine around the cosy fire pits in front of the hotel. It felt like a safe place to give teenagers some space in a fairly contained area, and ours made the most of it.
Pismo Beach calls itself the Clam Capital of the World, so there was only one place to go for dinner: Splash Café, for clam chowder served in a sourdough bread bowl. They claim to make tens of thousands of gallons of it a year, and after one bowl we could see why.
The next morning we headed north for dune buggies, sea otters and elephant seals, which you’ll find in Pismo Beach to Big Sur.
In closing
This first stretch of our road trip was wonderfully varied: ocean views, links to music and film, mountains, rolling farmland, vineyards and something unexpectedly Danish. It felt a million miles from Los Angeles, even though it's only a few hours up the road.
If you only need to get from Los Angeles to Pismo Beach, US-101 will do it in an afternoon. If you have the whole day, take the long way round and save room for a bowl of clam chowder when you arrive. The next leg, Pismo Beach to Big Sur, is where things get sandy.
So far, so good. Next stop, the dunes.
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