birthday in big sur.

To celebrate my birthday on Sunday we rented a car (a baby blue Mini Cooper!) and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to Big Sur. As carless city dwellers, we don’t spend very much time driving so the road trip element was so much fun – I had almost forgotten how great it is to crank up the radio and have a little dance party in the car. It’s one of my favorite things ever (and we found a radio station that was playing 90s hip hop! I was going crazy. Sorry, B!)

Big Sur was very high on my travel wish list after seeing so many absolutely gorgeous photos of its coastline on Pinterest, so as soon as we moved to California I knew it needed to be a must visit for 2015. Everything about the trip was just stunning – we drove through the mountains on a twisty curvy stretch of road that felt like it was in the middle of the forest. We saw acres and acres of farmland with their very own produce stands outside (5 avocados for $5. How do they do it?!). And once we hit the final stretch right along the coast I was glued to the window trying to soak in all of the beauty of the cliffs meeting the ocean.

If you’re not familiar with Big Sur it’s a pretty sparsely populated area of the coast line in Monterey County – if you’re looking for a really adorable beach town, you won’t really find it here but you will definitely find miles and miles of hiking, a ton of wildlife and a really crazy drive along Highway 1 that takes you through curves and crazy bridges all right on the edge of the ocean. So think, more soaking in the views and less having brunch, hitting up boutiques and making a big beach day of it.

The day was perfectly low key – we grabbed lunch and went to Pfeiffer Beach which was tricky to find but just an awesome area (tip: make sure you have cash, it’s $10 to park near the beach which you will want to do because otherwise the walk is about 2 miles from the road). After a few hours hanging out on the beach and exploring the mini tide pools along the shoreline, we leisurely began our drive back and stopped at a bunch of the roadside vantage points to grab photos and get our final peeks at Big Sur’s beauty.