Twenty viewpoints, and the seals got four of the names
An All-American Road in California whose catalogued views open on a knot of playful names and close, near the northern end, on a run of viewpoints named for seals.
Twenty lookouts are on the roster for the San Luis Obispo North Coast Byway. Read the names instead of the coordinates and they sort into three registers: a handful that sound like private jokes, a few that sound like a form filled in quickly, and four that hand the coast to the seals.
Four of the twenty viewpoints on this road are named for seals, and all four sit within a mile and a half of each other.
The six at the southern end
Concrete Turret. Lone Oak. Lover's Point. Octopus Oak. The Notch. Avila Overlook. All six sit together at the southern end of the roster, and the farthest two of them, Lover's Point and Avila Overlook, are just over a mile apart.
Only Avila Overlook reads like a map label. The other five are named for things a person noticed standing there: a turret made of concrete, a single oak, an oak somebody named for an octopus, a notch, and whatever made someone call a point Lover's. Somebody had fun naming this stretch, and the catalogue kept every one.
Twenty-five miles to the next one
North of Avila Overlook, the next lookout is Cayucos Point, twenty-five miles away in a straight line. It is the widest gap between neighbours anywhere on the list. After it the stops come in pairs and short runs: Cayucos Point and Estero Bay under seven tenths of a mile apart, then thirteen miles to Leffingwell Landing, with Moonstone Beach on the byway less than half a mile from it.
Two stops called Vista Pt
Past Leffingwell Landing, two entries carry exactly the same name, abbreviated exactly the same way: Vista Pt. They are about three miles apart. A third entry, a third of a mile from View of Hearst Castle, is called Vista Area. This is the plain register of the roster, and it sits right beside its most famous name.
View of Hearst Castle is the only lookout named for a building, and it is named, precisely, for the view of it. San Simeon Point is under nine tenths of a mile away.
Where the seals come in
Seal Point. Elephant Seal Vista Point. Elephant Seal Viewing Area. Elephant Seals Vista Point. The first three sit within about a third of a mile of each other. The fourth, the one with the plural, is just under a mile and a half from the farthest of them. Four records and four slightly different wordings of one idea, where a single name could have done the job.
Under a mile and a half from Seal Point, and half a mile off the route, sits the Piedras Blancas Light Station Outstanding Natural Area. Eight miles north of Seal Point, Point Sierra Nevada and Breaker Point mark the northern end of the roster, six tenths of a mile apart.
What that makes the drive
The two lookouts farthest apart, Lover's Point and Breaker Point, are fifty-eight miles apart in a straight line, and the road between them is longer than that. Across it the names tell you something the coordinates cannot: who got to name each stretch. The south went to whoever was having fun, the middle to whoever was filling in the form, and the north to the seals.
The castle got a view from a distance. The seals got four viewpoints with their names on them.
Pull in at any of the four and drive the rest of it like a guest. On this stretch of coast, the naming rights were already taken before you arrived.