Monterey to San Luis Obispo

Colton Hall, the stone building you may notice as you start through downtown Monterey, is where forty-eight delegates gathered in September 1849 to draft California's…

Laguna Seca Raceway, just off Highway 68 near here, was built in 1957 after races were banned on the public roads of nearby Pebble Beach following a fatal crash.

The Salinas Valley you're dropping into produces more than sixty percent of the nation's lettuce and a huge share of its broccoli, celery, and strawberries.

On September 17th, 1963, a converted flatbed truck carrying 57 bracero farmworkers collided with a train at a crossing just south of here.

Gonzales processes more vegetables per capita than almost any town in California.

Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, founded in 1791, was so remote and miserable that priests assigned here sometimes begged to be transferred.

Greenfield is one of the fastest-growing wine regions in California, but almost none of the grapes are crushed here.

The Salinas River flowing alongside you is one of the longest underground rivers in the United States.

King City exists because of a shrewd land deal.

Right through here, the Salinas Valley squeezes down to some of its narrowest points.

Those pumping jacks you can see bobbing along the landscape belong to the San Ardo oil field, one of the largest in California.

Bradley is one of the smallest communities along US-101, with a population that has hovered around two hundred for decades. It was named for Bradley V.

Camp Roberts trained over four hundred thousand soldiers during World War Two, making it one of the largest military training installations in the country at the time.

The Salinas River has been running alongside you for most of this drive, and right through here it flows underground for long stretches.

Paso Robles sits on top of a geothermal system that made it famous long before wine.

Templeton was founded in 1886 as a temperance colony, meaning alcohol was legally banned from the start.

Atascadero was founded in 1913 by Edward Gardner Lewis, a magazine publisher and serial town-builder who had already tried and failed to create a utopian community in…

Santa Margarita sits on one of the oldest and largest land grants in the county.

You're climbing the Cuesta Grade, one of the steepest sustained highway grades in California.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo sits on roughly six thousand acres, making it one of the largest university campuses in the entire country.

Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, founded in 1772 by Father Junípero Serra, is the reason red clay roof tiles became standard across California.

Bubblegum Alley is a seventy-foot-long passageway coated in an estimated two million pieces of chewed gum, some dating back to the late 1950s.