California road trip in December
 

My husband and I are thinking of flying out to San Diego with our kids (18 and 20 years old) for a nine night road trip up to San Francisco in December. Since we don't have any more time available for the trip, we are thinking a couple days in San Diego, a couple in los Angeles, and then head up to San Francisco for a couple days. We thought maybe a stop somewhere for a day some where in between L.A. And San Francisco but we aren't sure where. We are looking for insight in to another placed we'd want to include. We aren't concerned about the weather being cool but hoping we aren't going to be rained on the whole trip.

In my experience, and confirmed by weatherbase.com. you have a significantly better chance of being rained on in the north than in the south (5 days of precipitation on average in LA vs 11 days in San Francisco, drought notwithstanding).

Having lived north & south, I have much drier/sunnier memories of winter in Southern California. You might consider staying south, with so much to do between San Diego and, say, Santa Barbara.

There is no way to tell if you will be rained on until a day or two before. October was very wet but it is dry and warm now . . . but that doesn't mean much one way or the other. A good thing is -- unless you mean over the christmas Holiday you wouldn't need to pre-book almost anywhere.

So you could semi-play it by ear. If there are winter storms down south (and there can be) you can head north and vice versa.

And if it is stormy everywhere - there is plenty to keep you busy in just SD, Orange County and LA.

If the 9 days includes your arrival-by-air day and your departure-by-air day, I think I would skip San Diego and concentrate on Los Angeles and San Francisco. 3 or 4 nights L.A., 2 or 3 nights up the coast, and then 3 nights SF.

If you want to drive the coast between LA and SF, including Big Sur, then you should plan at least 2 nights for that part of trip this time of year if you can manage. We only have about 10 hours of daylight each day and the drive is about 10 hours long. It can be done over 2 days (1 overnight - 5 hours of driving per day), but it will be much better if you can do the drive over 3 days (2 nights). That will allow you to stop and see things along the way, explore the towns where you stay, etc.

You want 3 nights San Diego (meaning 2 full days), same for LA and SF, that is 9 days right there, plus two nights driving Hwy 1, so you need to either add more days or drop something.

Rain?? In San Diego? What the heck is rain? It is such a rare occurrance (unfortunately) and I doubt we'll have any. The last big news of rain was sprinkles that caused freeways to back up and people to freak out.

To clarify -- I wasn't talking about San Diego but SoCal in general. There can be serious rain in parts - as this photo on the 710/Long Beach Freeway shows.

http://www.trbimg.com/img-55f846c0/t...c-live-updates