Along Pacific Coastal Highway between Santa Maria and San Francisco

I was looking very much forward to this stretch of our May vacation in California.  But the days before I was recalculating on google and we realised that we did not have the time to drive the full stretch and take time to do some stops and enjoy them in any reasonable way with a baby.

So we had to make choices: either we took the part of coastal road between Santa Maria until Monterey with no options to make shortcuts anymore, to then take the busy highway inland as of there to rush quickly to SF...either we drove inland until Monterey and cruised the last shorter part until SF.  The first is the famous "Big Sur", the latter was probably the least stressfull: better control on how much time left to drive to SF and the calmest road to approach the city.  

With a lot of disappointment & frustration we decided to not go via the Big Sur....so don't any of you now dare to come and tell me how we've missed the most fantastic part of California!! Let's just think that you always need something to return to.

So we ended up driving inland through wine countries, quickly drove by Monterey (but didn't find it too exciting to have a stop) .  We had a most fabulous stop at the Ano Nuevo State Park where we did a short hike to go and admire the wild sea elephants and sea lions on the beach and we saw some whales passing by.  Yihaaaa, excellent!  Gorgeous place to visit!

I had hoped that further Half Moon Bay would have been an interesting stop but it looked pretty dull and at ease we arrived via the beach into San Francisco, our end destination of the trip.