You can’t go wrong in the scenery department along the California coast.
Ideally you’d have the time to drive all of it, from the Tijuana estuary to the redwood rainforest up at the Oregon border. For a bowl-you-over sampler, though, it’s hard to beat State Route 1’s reach between Malibu and Monterey, which gives you not only stunning front-row seats to one of the world’s great oceanfronts but also a taste for the subtle transition between Southern California and the Central Coast.