THE COAST ROAD ESCAPE THE INTERSTATE FOR A DRIVE THROUGH THE BEACH TOWNS OF NORTH SAND DIEGO COUNTY.

Byline: Story by Eric Noland Travel Editor

OCEANSIDE, Calif. - A whoop went up at the next table. A fellow in his mid-50s, lingering over a late breakfast at the 101 Cafe, couldn't believe that the Beach Boys' ``Little Deuce Coupe'' had come on the jukebox, especially since one of the vintage hot rods - probably his - was at that moment parked outside at the curb.

The song, the car, the menu probably evoked a powerful longing for an era that was left behind in the whine of an interstate highway.

Funny how that works: Travelers grow weary of poking along a two-lane road, stopping at lights and eating at buyer-beware establishments. They demand and get 10-lane, nondescript freeways, with exits that feature gas stations, minimarts and Burger Kings all in one. And then they long for the charm and simplicity of an old road.

You can still find one in northern San Diego County - as long as you're not in a hurry. It's a good one, right along the coast, paralleling Interstate 5 and squiggling about 29 miles from Oceanside to La Jolla. Along the way are eight beach towns, each with its own distinct personality: scruffy Oceanside, sparkling Carlsbad, time-warp Leucadia, New Age Encinitas, upscale-but-still-artsy La Jolla.

There are also 13 beach parks, many of which don't charge for parking. And there are a great number of independent, endearing businesses you won't find anywhere else: surf shops, hamburger stands, inns, patio restaurants, taco joints, antique (and junk) shops, art galleries, consignment furniture stores.

The road is every bit as eclectic as the commerce along it. On maps, you'll find it designated as county route S21, but the road signs and addresses give it six other names (about one every five miles), including Coast Highway, Carlsbad Boulevard, South Coast Highway 101, and North Torrey Pines Road.

Sure, I-5 will get you to San Diego quicker, but it won't propel you back in time. And it won't slow you down - which can be a good thing. Also, if you sprang for a sunroof when you bought your car, you'll be really glad you have it on this road.

Exploring it is as simple as exiting the 5 south at Coast Highway in Oceanside and always keeping the Pacific on your right.

To get off to a proper start, you probably couldn't find a better orientation to beach culture than at the California Surf Museum in Oceanside (223 N. Coast Highway). It's an intimate, storefront place, and it currently features a look at the early days of California board-riders - from 1900 to 1940 (the exhibit runs into October). Explore the museum and you're astounded to find a 100-pound, 14-foot monster board from the 1930s, made of mahogany and plywood. There's also a 7-footer from 1914 made of solid sugar pine.

``The guys got up on solid wooden boards and came straight in,'' said Rich Watkins, who presides over the museum in white beard and faded aloha shirt. ``It was basically a race - 25 guys in one wave, a contest to see who could get to the buoy first.'' It wasn't until the 1940s, he said, that pioneers such as Tom Blake developed hollow boards and began sliding across the front of a wave.

Watkins is a self-professed ``former greaser from Van Nuys'' who moved with his family to San Clemente as a teen and got swallowed up in the surf culture. Today, he is an impassioned caretaker of its history.

A short distance away, the Oceanside Pier provides an optimal vantage point for observing what the sport has become. If you walk down to where the waves crest, you can get practically an aerial view of today's wetsuited thrill-seekers as they knife back and forth through the curls.

There's nothing highbrow about the beach below. It is popular with working-class folk, some pushing baby strollers right onto the sand. People fish from the pier, and the sailboats share the water with some incongruous vessels - amphibious assault craft from nearby Camp Pendleton Marine Base.

On a walk along Pier View Way, you might notice the '50s-style barbershop with the striped, twisting twin poles outside. As a freshly shorn grunt exits, you'll probably spot the sign in the window that reads ``neck shave included.''

The drive south through town recalls a bygone era, epitomized by the Star Theatre (402 N. Coast Highway), which appears delightfully frozen in the year it was built - 1956. After some recent unsuccessful runs as a movie house, it reopened at the end of April as a performing arts center, and will be used occasionally for independent film festivals.

Oceanside has strained in recent years to shake its reputation as a roughhouse military town, with mixed results.

To gain a sense of rising rents and respectability, you need only cross the Buena Vista Lagoon and climb into Carlsbad. This is a community of gourmet coffee houses, restaurants with leafy patios and stylish bed-and- breakfast inns.

But it isn't necessarily stuffy. At Carlsbad State Beach, there are no traffic lights at the crosswalks that are painted across the coast highway. People simply step out into the street and wait for the cars to stop (they readily do), and then hurry across carrying beach chairs, babies, ice chests and surfboards.

This is a good place to walk along the beach or take a plunge into the waves. During high tide, the surf claims the sand entirely, but there is a pedestrian walkway here behind a formidable sea wall.

A couple of blocks from the bluff, on Walnut Avenue, is the Pelican Cove Inn, a delightful place to stop for the night if you're desirous of taking your time on this coast tour. It's done in the motif of a New England ship captain's home, painted grayish-blue with white trim, bay windows, a cupola and a pelican weather vane.

Innkeeper Nancy Nayudu was found to be friendly without being intrusive or fussy, traits that seem to afflict a lot of B&b proprietors. ``I grew up in a very casual home,'' she said at one point. ``I think the fewer rules, the better.'' After checking us in, she headed for the basketball hoop in the driveway to help her young son work on his crossover dribble.

These are the kinds of towns where you can walk to dinner, but the side streets were so pleasantly dark that we needed a flashlight. Within a few blocks, we found Vigilucci's Cucina Italiana (2943 State St.), which stands ready to sate weary travelers.

It features an extensive selection of Italian wines, reasonably priced; some 20 pasta dishes on the menus, most in the $10 range; and the highlight of the night, an antipasto misto ($10.95) that featured roasted bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, marinated mushrooms, prosciutto di Parma, salami, and fontina and buffalo mozzarella cheeses.

Our room at the Pelican Cove Inn proved a welcoming place to wind down the evening. It had a gas fireplace, whirlpool tub and Scandia feather bed. Its bay windows, though facing south, captured the cool breezes off the ocean.

It was a pleasant surprise to find a shelf of old, leather-bound volumes of some classic authors, including Washington Irving and William Makepeace Thackeray. I tried to get started on ``Rip Van Winkle,'' but in this setting, I was out before Rip was.

Leucadia is the next town to the south, and it seems to take pride in having none of Carlsbad's upscale sensibility.

The walls of ABC Trading Co. (1240 A/B N. Highway 101) are packed with junk and a few antiques, too: old neon signs, pop bottles, vinyl record albums. ``All prices are negotiable - the rent's due,'' said the proprietor, who was sitting in a chair on the front porch as we approached.

If you're hunting for coffee or tea along this stretch, you won't find a Starbucks, but instead Pannikin, housed in the former Encinitas train depot (moved to the current location at 510 N. Highway 101). It features big wooden sliding doors, old railroad signs and artifacts (including a baggage cart with steel-spoke wheels). In the basement, you'll find a gallery exhibiting the works of local artists - oils, watercolors, photography - all very reasonably priced.

A bit farther south - just past a surf shop that advertises ``ding repair'' - is a true beach-town treasure: Lou's Records (434 N. Coast Highway 101). Its unassuming buildings are crammed with a mind-boggling stock of new and used CDs, records and tapes. To immerse yourself in the true spirit of this trip, check out the bookcase that holds the surf music. It's astonishing, holding perhaps 1,000 CDs in all, most priced in the $10 range.

We were thrilled to continue south with the Ventures blasting from the car speakers, and we probably made it six or seven miles before the repetitive riffs of the Fender guitars, heavy on the reverb, wore us out.

The transition to the community of Encinitas is a subtle one, marked primarily by the sudden proliferation of New Age establishments: Natural Relax Wellness Products, the Self-Realization Fellowship Retreat and Hermitage, etc. Accordingly, surfers long ago began referring to the beach below the bluff as Swami's, and the name stuck (it's included on maps and in the city registry of beach parks).

Encinitas is also home to a must-stop lunch counter: Juanita's (290 N. Coast Highway). This is no yuppie Mexican grill with a lot of fresh stuff. It is basic and throwback: deep-fried fish tacos served with lime wedges, tortas, burritos, combination plates, hard-shell tacos that drip oil, salty meats, spicy beans and rice - all absurdly inexpensive.

You'll probably find a line here at lunchtime, and the crowd is a diverse one: dusty contractors, businessmen, barefoot surfers (no one complains). We took our grub and backtracked to South Carlsbad State Beach, where there is no charge to park along the highway. The lunch setting - a long sweep of sand, crashing waves, noisy seagulls, invigorating breezes - is something to linger over. We noticed a lot of cars containing local working folk squeezing as much out of their noontime break as they could.

There are many beach spots to stop at as you continue farther south, but after snaking through Cardiff by the Sea, Solana Beach and Del Mar, be sure to turn into Torrey Pines State Reserve just before the road bends inland and climbs steeply toward La Jolla.

The reserve is a refreshing swath of open space in an area of extremely high property values. You need only walk one of the many bluff paths to pick up some stunning coastal views (at Razor Point, for example). Along the way, you'll pass by gullies that reveal the perils of coastline residency in California - sandstone bluffs that have been so savagely eroded they resemble sandcastles at high tide.

The reserve's visitor center is housed in a historic adobe. Visitors to the park must pay a $2 fee here.

The S21 road peters out in La Jolla, but to conclude your trip in fitting fashion, consider a stay at La Valencia Hotel, which is as old as the coast road itself. The Pink Lady of La Jolla, as it has come to be known, dates to 1926 and commands a hill overlooking La Jolla Cove.

The hotel just completed some stylish new ocean villas, but we were more intrigued with the historic portion of the place. The rooms have old-new touches, such as high ceilings, crown molding, French country antique furniture, marble bathrooms, elegant beds and gourmet snack items in a mini-bar basket, but we were also thrilled that it wasn't sealed up in a climate-control truss, as is the case in so many modern hotels.

Here, the windows open wide. Ours didn't even have screens on them; you can let the breezes off the cove infuse your lodgings with cool, fresh, salt-scented air. At the end of the day, we watched a tremendous orange ball of a sun dip into the ocean.

As the darkness gathered, a street musician in the park below could be heard playing a plaintive melody on a wooden recorder.

Later, in the middle of the night, the honk of a seal or sea lion drifted through the open window.

It was reassuring.

After a couple of days spent meandering down a nostalgic coastal road, you're certainly in no hurry to part company with its sights, sounds and rhythms.

IF YOU GO

Selected attractions of the coast road in northern San Diego County:

California Surf Museum: 223. N. Coast Highway, Oceanside; open Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; no admission charge (donation welcomed); [phone]; www.surfmuseum.org.

Pelican Cove Inn: 320 Walnut Ave., Carlsbad; rooms from $90; [phone]; www.pelican-cove.com/pelican.

Vigilucci's Italian Cucina: 2943 State St., Carlsbad; [phone].

Torrey Pines State Reserve: Open daily from 8 a.m. until sunset (Visitor Center opens at 9 a.m.); daily $2 parking fee, payable at Visitor Center; [phone]; www.torreypine.org.

La Valencia Hotel: 1132 Prospect St., La Jolla; rooms from $250; [phone]; www.lavalencia.com.

CAPTION(S):

9 photos, box, map

Photo:

(1 -- 4 -- color) A drive along S21 in San Diego takes in the Retro Star Theatre in Oceanside, top, the inviting beaches of Carlsbad, center, the bluff-top viewpoints of Torrey Pines State Reserve, above, and at the end of the road, the open-window charm of La Jolla's La Valencia Hotel, right.

(5 -- 6) Rich Watkins, left, looks after the California Surf Museum in Oceanside, which displays early, heavy wooden boards among its items. Today, the Oceanside beach and pier, below, remains a haven for surfers and other beachcombers.

(7) At the La Valencia Hotel, also known as the Pink Lady of La Jolla, guests can enjoy sunny views of the cove, breathe the sea air - and also take in the building's proud history.

(8 -- 9) North Torrey Pines Road, above, traces the coastline along north San Diego County, where beaches are usually free from crowds; if not, one can always take to the air from the Torry Pines Gliderport.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer

Box: If You Go (see text)

Map: S21 highway