Beyond the South: Bucket List Trip
This trip was a dream come true for me, a true bucket list adventure my girlfriend Ginger and I had been planning, one that took us from the Las Vegas Strip to the heart of LA, up one of the most famous coastlines in the country, and into San Francisco. This trip journal is the second entry in “Beyond the South” where we venture outside the South and cover car destinations, roads and stops along the way.
Before any great road trip can begin, there has to be a car. As soon as the plane touched down in Las Vegas, I headed straight for the rental counter to pick up our ride for the week. I knew from the beginning that I wanted a convertible. There would be desert roads, mountain curves, California wine country and the Pacific Coast Highway ahead, and having the roof open was part of the experience. Rather than going with the predictable Mustang or Camaro, I chose a 2025 BMW 430i Convertible. Under the hood is BMW’s 2.0-liter TwinPower Turbo four-cylinder, producing 255 horsepower and 295 lb-ft of torque (no M car horsepower but enough to be fun), with an eight-speed transmission. The 430 also uses a 48-volt mild-hybrid system that helps provide a little extra response at lower speeds. It isn’t a light sports car, the convertible weighs around 4,000 lbs, but surprisingly it doesn’t feel like a heavy car especially when the road starts to curve. The turbo four has a good bit of get up and go, the chassis feels planted and tight, and the car is remarkably comfortable covering long stretches of highway. Most importantly, it felt like the right kind of car for this trip, quick enough to be entertaining, comfortable enough for hundreds of miles. Most importantly with the top down it’s perfectly suited to seeing California from behind the wheel.
Vegas was our starting point for this adventure. We stayed at the Fontainebleau, the striking blue-glass tower that opened on the Strip in December 2023. At 67 stories, it’s the tallest building in Las Vegas, and the lobby matches the scale, with a soaring gold-domed ceiling, waterfall-style chandeliers, and arrangements of hundreds of red roses greeting you the moment you walk in.
Our first full day started with breakfast at La Fontaine, just one of the many hotel restaurants, we had the best Blueberry Pancakes of our lives.
Once finished we headed out to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, top down of course, about 20 minutes west of the Strip, where a 13-mile scenic loop winds through red-and-cream sandstone cliffs that feel like a different planet from the one we’d just left.
On the way back into town, we cruised the Strip itself with the top still down, taking our time past the old neon signs and marquees that have defined Vegas for decades a different kind of scenery than the desert, but just as much fun from behind the wheel.
Back at the Fontainebleau that evening, we headed up to the Poodle Room for drinks, the striking, members-style social club crowning the top of the tower with its surreal mix of retro, fur-lined decor, giant poodle statues, and sweeping views of the Strip. A strict no photo policy is in place, so unfortunately there’s no pictures to share. After taking in the atmosphere up top, we finished the night down at Don’s Prime, the hotel’s own old-school steakhouse featuring dark green leather booths, prime cuts from an exclusive Colorado ranch partnership, and the kind of unhurried, white-tablecloth service that made it easy to sit back and talk about what we had seen that day. After a good meal and a night of great sleep, we were ready to point west toward Route 66 and LA.
We started out early the next morning, it was a chilly morning so top was up for this part of the road. Eventually there was a stretch of the old Mother Road, Route 66. One of our plans was to travel some of Route 66 if we could, the highway was decommissioned as an official U.S. route back in 1985, but long sections of the original road still exist, kept alive by small towns, roadside diners, and vintage motels that lean into the nostalgia rather than let it fade.
By the time we reached Barstow, it was time for to fill up the Bimmer. The gas station was EddieWorld in nearby Yermo which doesn’t feels like a normal gas stop. Billed as the largest gas station in California at 27,000 square feet, it’s home to a 65-foot water tower shaped like a giant ice cream sundae, cherry included, and packs in rows of candy, fresh pizza and sushi counters, and a mascot clinging to one of the columns inside. Between the bottle trees, the antiques, and the ice cream cone rising out of the desert, driving even this one piece of Route 66 feels like a detour through American car culture’s origin story.
After gassing up and we hit the road and stopped in Victorville, where we grabbed lunch at Hay Madre Mia, a family-run spot with daily hand-made tortillas and a menu of authentic Mexican food. I had a burrito and Ginger chose street tacos, everything was really good and fresh. I loved the homemade salsas they gave us.
From there we wandered past the old Hotel signs still standing along the streets in Victorville and the site of the town’s original railway depot before continuing onward.
We ventured northward to the next stop was in Oro Grande, home to Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch, a genuinely strange and wonderful roadside stop where more than 200 bottle trees hold more than 1000 colored glass bottles, alongside sculptures built from old car parts, typewriters, and anything else the site’s late founder collected out of the desert over the decades. That founder was Elmer Evan Long (1946–2019).
Long began building the ranch around 2000, using old metal pipe, discarded objects, and a huge collection of colorful glass bottles that he had accumulated with his father, Elmer Long Sr., during desert camping trips. The first bottle trees grew out of his desire to do something with his father’s collection. What makes the story particularly interesting is that the ranch wasn’t really conceived as a tourist attraction. Long was essentially creating his own piece of folk art. It quickly became one of the iconic roadside attractions along Route 66.
Just down the road, we saw Route 66 Antique and decided to make a stop to look around. It’s one of the scattered antique shops this stretch of desert is known for, where old objects of all sorts, windmills and hand-painted signs pile up outside a building that looks like it’s been standing since the highway’s beginning.
After exploring we got back on the road and pointed the BMW towards LA, enjoying the desert scenery which is like an alien world to this Southerner. Eventually we crossed over the San Bernardino Mountains before descending into the LA basin.
Arriving in LA, we based ourselves at the Kimpton Hotel Wilshire, right on Museum Row in the Miracle Mile district it’s a boutique hotel set inside a converted 1950s building, with a rooftop pool looking out toward the Hollywood Hills.
That first night we walked down to Tom Bergin’s for drinks, LA’s oldest Irish pub, open since 1936 and tucked into a Tudor Revival building on Fairfax just south of Wilshire. The place is famous for its horseshoe bar, its Irish coffee, and thousands of paper shamrocks covering the walls and ceiling, each one bearing the name of a regular.
Our hotel also put us walking distance from several of the city’s museums, including the one I was most excited about. If there’s one stop built for car enthusiasts specifically, it’s the Petersen. Sitting right on Wilshire Boulevard with its unmistakable stainless-steel ribbon exterior, it’s impossible to miss and impossible to rush through. The museum opened in 1994, founded by publishing magnate Robert E. Petersen, the man behind Hot Rod magazine and a string of other automotive titles and has grown into one of the largest automotive museums in the world, with three floors of exhibits spanning concept cars, motorsport history, and vehicles that shaped Hollywood’s image of the open road. It’s the rare museum where the building itself is worth the visit before you even see a single car inside, and for anyone building a car-focused West Coast trip, it’s the anchor stop. I will dive deeper into The Petersen in a separate article, it’s worth its own piece, truly a bucket list destination for an automotive enthusiast!
The Petersen wasn’t the only museum on the itinerary. We also spent time at The Broad, the contemporary art museum downtown known for its striking honeycomb exterior and free admission to its permanent collection, and the Getty, perched in the hills above the city with sweeping views, a world-class art collection, and gardens worth the trip on their own. Neither is a car museum, but both rounded out a day of LA culture nicely.
It was time to explore LA, in the morning was The Broad then The Getty. After our museum stops it was time for Randy’s Donuts in Inglewood, the giant rooftop donut that’s become one of LA’s most photographed landmarks since it opened in 1953. It’s shown up in dozens of films and TV shows over the decades everything from Iron Man 2 to Mars Attacks! it’s every bit as much of a roadside icon as anything we saw on Route 66.
From Randy’s, the car turned toward the more glamorous side of town a slow drive down Rodeo Drive, through Beverly Hills, and past the Chinese Theater and Walk of Fame. Later we stopped at Erewhon on Beverly Drive, the upscale organic grocery chain that’s become something of an LA institution in its own right, equal parts grocery store and celebrity-spotting destination, famous for its lineup of pricey, elaborate smoothies. Supper that night came from Erewhon’s own deli counter, picking through prepared foods and grab-and-go dishes that felt more like a high-end restaurant spread than typical grocery store fare. I didn’t see any Ferraris or Lamborghinis but did see several Bentley SUVs.
The next morning we set out heading towards the Pacific Coast Highway. On our way out we stopped at the Original Farmers Market at 3rd and Fairfax, an LA institution since 1934 that started as a handful of farmers selling produce out of their trucks on a vacant dairy farm, turned oil field lot and grew into more than 100 permanent food stalls and shops under the market’s signature green awnings, the kind of place locals still casually gather and shop.
From there, we drove down toward Santa Monica to pick up the Pacific Coast Highway and pointed north toward the Madonna Inn and this is where the trip really opened up to great driving, cliffside curves, ocean on one side and hills on the other, the kind of road that earns its reputation as one of the best in the country. This is one of the stretches of road that I really enjoyed driving the BMW.
Along the way we broke up the drive with a glass of wine at the Hitching Post in Buellton, right in the heart of Santa Barbara wine country. It’s a low-key spot with a surprisingly big claim to fame, the restaurant and its wines were featured prominently in Sideways, the 2004 film that ended up winning an Academy Award and is widely credited with sparking a national surge in Pinot Noir’s popularity. We sat outside underneath trees overlooking fields enjoying our wine and each other’s company. In the distance we watched, not what I thought we would in a California field, ostriches! Yep, there were several roaming around in a fenced in field in the distance.
Back on the road not long after, we passed through Solvang, a small town that looks like it was airlifted in from Denmark, complete with windmills and half-timbered buildings, founded by Danish settlers back in 1911. From there we left PCH and cut inland toward San Luis Obispo, closing out the day at the Madonna Inn.
The Madonna Inn is a landmark in its own right since it opened in 1958 and one of the most recognizable roadside stops in California. Every one of its rooms is individually themed, from cave like stone walls to over the top Western décor, and the property’s signature pink shows up everywhere, from the exterior to the bakery case. We had supper at the Inn and finished the night with a slice of the Madonna Inn’s famous champagne cake pink, fluffy, and every bit as much a signature of the place as the rooms. It’s the kind of stop that turns a simple overnight stay into its own story, exactly the sort of detail we plan to dig into further in a future article.
The next morning we pointed our way back to the Pacific Coast Highway and continued north, and it wasn’t long before we reached the elephant seals, a strange, unforgettable roadside stop that has nothing to do with cars and everything to do with why road trips beat flying.
Past that point, though, the route through Big Sur itself was closed. A landslide at Regent’s Slide near Lucia had shut down that stretch of Highway 1 for an extended period starting in early 2024, we took this trip the summer of 2025, cutting off through traffic between Big Sur and the Central Coast, so we ended up turning around and backtracking to reroute. A good reminder that a coastal road trip like this one rewards some flexibility in the schedule, since the highway doesn’t always cooperate.
The detour worked out in our favor though, since it routed us toward Niner Wine Estates in Paso Robles, where we sat down for a wine tasting and wandered the grounds and gardens. Niner’s tasting room looks out over Heart Hill Vineyard, named for a naturally occurring grove of oak trees on the hillside that forms the unmistakable shape of a heart a Highway 46 landmark since the 1950s and one of those details you can’t unsee once someone points it out.
Along the way, we also passed a gate marked “Hidden Valley Ranch” the actual ranch where Steve Henson invented ranch dressing back in the 1950s while running it as a dude ranch in the mountains outside Santa Barbara not a car story, but exactly the kind of roadside trivia that makes a long drive worth taking slow.
About an hour north of Niner, we stopped for lunch in King City at La Pontranca, a walk up and order at the window Mexican restaurant, It didn’t matter the food was good. The decision was made to sit outside on a picnic table since the weather was perfect for this, we love eating outside. After lunch we walked down the town’s main street to stretch our legs a bit before getting back on the road.
The road was Highway 101 for the final stretch north into San Francisco. This drive turned into mile after mile of California farmland a different kind of scenery, quieter and greener than anything we’d seen since Vegas.
Once getting into San Francisco we checked into our hotel, the Taj Campton Place, a historic boutique hotel just steps from Union Square with roots dating back to 1909. Once unpacking we walked down to Union Square for awhile before returning for our reservations at Bombay Brasserie, the hotel’s own Indian restaurant.
The next day we walked around Union Square and ventured a little further before taking a Waymo, one of the self-driving taxis that have become a fixture of the city’s streets, over to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. That was an adventure in itself, the Waymo circled the block 3 times and got stuck in construction, amid the honking I called the onboard assitance to get us unstuck from the construction area. Eventually freeing us from the road rage induced honking and people passing us staring angrily, a strange and fitting way to arrive at a museum after being behind the wheel for some of the best roads I’ve driven. The decision was easy just to walk back to the hotel, it took essentially the same time walking as the Waymo took given the issues it encountered.
The next morning we loaded up the Bimmer for one last drive before turning it in at the airport. Just a little input on the BMW. It was a great driving car, this 430’s 2.0 Turbo was surprisingly peppy, handled beautifully through the hills and curves through wine country, and having the top down for most of the trip made it an even more fun car to drive.
We drove through Chinatown on our way to the Golden Gate Bridge, a fitting bookend to a trip that had taken us from Las Vegas Strip to a stretch of Route 66, through the heart of LA, up one of America’s great coastal drives, and into a city built on hills as famous as any highway we’d driven.
Why This Trip Continues “Beyond the South” is because this is exactly the kind of trip Southern Motoring Society was built to document. Real roads, real stops, and the mix of car specific destinations and unexpected detours that turn a drive into a story. It’s the second entry in our ongoing “Beyond the South” series, following the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Boston, and we’ll keep covering the roads, museums, and communities outside of the South every chance we get.
We’re planning deeper dives into several stops from this trip in the weeks ahead, starting with a closer look at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Route 66 will be featured in SMS History 101 with a look at America’s most famous highway.