My first coastal drive was planned on distance. A hundred and sixty kilometres, allow two and a half hours, arrive for lunch.
It took five and a half hours and we arrived after dark, and nothing had gone wrong. That is simply what that road takes.
Why the estimate is always wrong
Route planners calculate on road type and speed limit, and coastal roads defeat both.
The bends mean you rarely reach the limit. A road with a fifty limit and a corner every hundred metres averages considerably less.
The gradient in many places adds to that, particularly where the road climbs headlands and drops into bays repeatedly.
Width is the third factor. Many coastal roads are single track with passing places, or narrow enough that meeting a bus requires one party to reverse.
And in season, the traffic is largely other visitors driving cautiously on a road they do not know, which sets the pace for everybody behind them.
My working figure now is to take the planner's estimate and double it, which has been about right on every coastal road I have driven.
The stopping is the point and it is not free
The other half of the underestimate.
A coastal drive with no stops is a waste of a coastal drive. But every stop is fifteen to thirty minutes by the time you have parked, walked to the viewpoint, looked, photographed and returned.
Six stops is three hours, on top of the driving.
Planning for that explicitly, rather than discovering it, is the difference between a relaxed day and one where you stop stopping in order to arrive.
What I do now is decide in advance on three or four proper stops and treat anything else as a bonus, rather than intending to stop wherever looks good and running out of day.
Parking is the actual constraint
The thing that determines whether a coastal day works, and it is entirely seasonal.
Popular coastal spots have small car parks that fill early. In season, arriving at eleven at a well-known cove frequently means no parking within a reasonable walk.
Verge parking is often prohibited, sometimes enforced, and on narrow roads it is genuinely obstructive.
The workable approaches are arriving early, arriving late in the afternoon as people leave, or choosing the places with proper parking and accepting they will be busier.
Paying for parking is worth it every time. The time spent driving around looking for free parking costs more than the fee.
Which direction you drive matters
Something I had not considered until somebody pointed it out.
Driving with the sea on the side of the road you are on means you can pull into viewpoints directly, without crossing traffic. Driving with the sea on the far side means every stop involves a turn across the road.
On a narrow, busy, blind-cornered coastal road, that is a real difference in both convenience and safety.
Which direction gives you that depends on which side of the road the country drives on and which way the coast runs, and it is worth thinking about for ten seconds when planning a route.
The other consideration is the sun. Driving into a low sun along a west-facing coast in the late afternoon is genuinely difficult and occasionally dangerous.
The practical coastal driving list
Fuel before you need it. Petrol stations on remote coasts are sparse and frequently close early or on Sundays.
Offline maps, because signal along coasts is unreliable in exactly the places where the road is complicated.
Water and something to eat, because the gap between places selling food can be long.
And knowing where you are sleeping, because finding accommodation at eight in the evening on a coast in season is a poor position.
The bit that makes it worth it
Having complained about the timings, the coastal drives I have done are the best driving I have done.
What makes them good is the same thing that makes them slow. The road follows the land rather than cutting through it, and every headland gives you something different.
The mistake is treating it as transport. Planned as a day out with a destination at the end, at half the speed you expected, stopping four times, it is one of the better ways to spend a day anywhere.
Motion sickness
Worth planning for on a road that is nothing but bends.
Passengers suffer far more than drivers, and children most of all. Sitting in the front, looking at the road ahead rather than at a screen, and having the window open all help genuinely.
Frequent stops help more than anything, which fits with the argument for treating the drive as a day out rather than a transfer.
If somebody in the car is susceptible, medication taken before setting off rather than once they feel ill is the standard advice and it works considerably better than the reverse.