Vancouver to San Diego down the Pacific Coast - CanaDream

Twenty-nine nights and 5,006 kilometres in a loop from Vancouver in a motorhome, down the Pacific coast to San Diego and back inland.

Seattle comes first, then the Oregon coast at Pacific City and Gold Beach, where Highway 101 runs along a shoreline of sea stacks, headlands and state parks that are public almost without exception, which is unusual on an American coast. Trinidad follows in the northern California redwoods, where the tallest trees on earth stand above three hundred feet.

Mendocino and Point Reyes come next, the second a peninsula on the far side of the San Andreas fault that moves north a few centimetres a year, with a lighthouse on one of the windiest points of the Pacific coast. Pfeiffer Big Sur follows, where the Santa Lucia Range drops into the sea and the road is cut into the cliff above it, then Santa Barbara, five nights around Anaheim and three in San Diego, before the route turns inland through Sacramento and Medford.

The motorhome and the day-by-day plan come from CanaDream, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with insurance options priced at booking. Thirty days with two nights at most of the coastal stops is a proper holiday rather than a drive, and the long legs are all at the end on the inland return. A motorhome of this size needs its length checked against the Big Sur pull-outs and the state park loops, several of which have vehicle limits. Campsites on the California coast book out months ahead in summer. Crossing into the United States needs the hire terms checked for cross-border cover, and the Anaheim and San Diego stays are clearly built around the theme parks and the zoo.