Weekend Driver San Diego

If you’ve got a Garmin, TomTom or iPhone, give this a try if you’re headed up to LA this weekend… or perhaps when you return. Turn off the freeway at Genesee Avenue (headed north) or  Oceanside Harbor Drive (headed south), head on over to the old Pacific Highway and give a GPS guided tour a [...]

Rocky trail cuts through west corner of state park Generally, I do a bit of research before heading out on one of these drives. I break out the maps, check the web and have a general idea of the roads I’m looking to experience. But for this trip, I decided to do what most folks [...]

James Bond Would Love San Bernardino Highway The yell came from the other pump island at the gas station near the base of the San Bernardino Mountains. “Going drifting in that thing?” asked a curious fourtysomething who probably shouldn’t have even been thinking about drifting, being that he was refueling a Dodge Caravan. He was [...]

Ford’s Commemorative Pony Car on Hills Steve McQueen Would Have Loved Originally published in October 2008 Go back a century and a new community, Mission Hills, sprouts north of downtown San Diego. Automobiles are The Next Big Thing and early adopters — just the kind of upscale clientele building homes in Mission Hills — were [...]

South Bay Cruise Promises a Chance of Less Traffic, Delivers Great Views From July 2007 San Diego in the summertime. Time for a beach cruise. But where to go? That’s the challenge. Traffic from the fair and beaches can make Old Highway 101 north of Torrey Pines pretty grim. South of Torrey Pines, La Jolla, [...]

John Daley is an unapologetic booster for U.S. 101. “It’s one of the three great highways in the world,” he’s happy to tell visitors to his 101 Cafe, a 1920s diner at the corner of Coast Highway and Wisconsin Avenue in Oceanside. Current maps don’t show U.S. 101 in San Diego County; in fact the [...]

A beautiful place with no name in Anza-Borrego Desert Note: I took this trip in March, 2005. Be sure to check with the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park ranger for current road conditions. Canyon Sin Nombre video Download GPS coordinates to your device for just $1.99! ne thing about a year with heavy rains in San [...]

Sand, Dust and Splinters Didn’t Challenge Imperial Valley’s Earliest Drivers On a sunny Sunday a few weeks ago, I set out to visit the remnants of the Old Plank Road, the first “reliable” connection across the Algodones Dunes near the Colorado River in Imperial County.

The lost city of Petra, Jordan, is a long way from San Diego. This faraway place, where the final scenes of the 1989 movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” were shot, came to mind in a trip to Split Mountain, in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The spectacular Petra gorge, where Indiana, his father [...]

One of the great things about living in San Diego is that in about an hour, you can drive from the coast to the mountains to the desert, which is where we’re headed today. Borrego Springs is the northeastern outpost of San Diego County, an oasis at the edge of the Colorado Desert, which extends [...]