Hi all,

I will be visiting SF in 2 weeks. The lenght of my stay is 5 days. I am very interesting in renting a car for one day and just go on a road trip. I was thinking about driving south along the Pacific Coast Highway or driving out to the Wine country.
Which offers a more scenic route?
Is driving along the Pacific Coast Highway safe..what kind of terrain? I live in Florida so I am used to driving in a totally flat terrain.
IS there any other recommended road trip?

There are any number of road trips- one I particularly like is to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge up through the Marin Headland and to Point Reyes from there you can continue to Bodega Bay and cut over to Santa Rosa to Calistoga and do the wine tour loop.

Do a search. This board is NOTHING if not a valuable discussion of San Francisco!

Unless you want to go wine tasting, I would stick with the coast for a more scenic route .

Utahtea

The roads along the coast are generally curvey, but never fear - as long as you poses the ability to stear a car, you can do it. There are plenty of places to pull off the road to take in the views.

If you don't mind driving a bit, Monterey is a couple hours outside of SF and can be done as a day trip.

Half Moon Bay is only about an hour south of SF - there are plenty of beaches between HMB and Pescadero. The contrast between these beaches and your experience with Florida beaches should be quite interesting.

You also might consider going up to Point Reyes National Seashore which is north of SF as mentioned before.

I agree with Utahtea, the coast route along Highway 1 is beautiful. If you still want to visit some wineries, there are plenty in the Santa Cruz Mountains on the way to Monterey. I would recommend picking up Highway 1 in the Monterey Bay Area(Santa Cruz) as opposed to driving Highway 1 all the way down from SF. The stretch from SF to Monterey is not as scenic as south of Monterey. Also, the road gets pretty narrow in some spots between SF and Monterey, especially around Devil's Slide. You could instaed take 280 to 17 through the Santa Cruz Mountains and then from there get onto Highway 1. 280 and 17 are both scenic drives. On the way to Santa Cruz and Monterey, dowtown San Jose is a good stopping off point for a nice lunch. There are lots of great restaurants/museums/other attractions that are worthwhile in the area. Some of the more popular places to visit are the Tech Museum and Winchester Mystery House. From there I would recommend going to Big Basin, which is about 10 or 15 miles outside of San Jose, to see the coastal redwoods.

http://sjdowntown.com/

http://sanjose.org/index.cfm

http://bigbasin.org/

The Monterey area has some of the best coastal California vistas. While in Monterey check out the aquarium, Fisherman's Wahrf, 17 Mile Drive, Carmel, and Point Lobos.

http://monterey.com/

Here's a link to wineries in the Santa Cruz area.

http://santacruz.winecountry.com/index.html