Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Photos By Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

RAGGED POINT, San Luis Obispo County — California may not yet be perfect but, on Wednesday, it came a lot closer.

With the reopening of Highway 1, the sinuous and spellbinding drive along the Big Sur coast is once again doable.

Among the first to do it were Charlotte and Antoine De Kort, visitors from the Netherlands. They were figuring on taking the Highway 101 detour instead — the route that tens of thousands of disappointed motorists have been shunted onto since May 2017, when 5 million cubic yards of earth slid into the Pacific Ocean in the biggest landslide in the coast road’s 81-year history.

But then they got word that Highway 1 was reopening two days ahead of the scheduled ribbon cutting Friday.

“We were lucky,” Antoine said, from behind the wheel of his rental car. “How amazing. All that rock that fell into the sea. And we got through.”

“It was like a roller coaster,” said Charlotte. “Really great. Beautiful. In the Netherlands, if you want to see mountains like this you have to go to Switzerland.”

One by one, the long-denied cars with the out-of-state plates proceeded over the eerie moonscape of a new road that Caltrans and its contractors cobbled together over the past 14 months.

The new quarter-mile stretch cost $54 million — that’s more than roughly twice as much as it cost to build the entire road, from Monterey to San Luis Obispo County, in the 1920s and 1930s, adjusting for inflation. Back then, the state saved a few bucks by asking San Quentin convicts to do much of the heavy lifting.

This time, the construction involved building two 25-foot embankments to protect the road from more slides from above and a quarter-mile breakwater to keep it from washing away from below.

Driving along the new stretch of highway that Caltrans dubbed the Mud Creek Slide on opening day was otherworldly. Enormous fresh scars of exposed earth on the mountainside butted against a solid wall of white and orange concrete barriers. The sea lapped against its new breakwater, the fog did its part to maintain the sense of isolation, and the seabirds wheeled and soared and wondered what all the fuss was about.

North of Mud Creek, workers in orange vests covered up signs that read, “Road Closed Ahead,” and uncovered other signs announcing, “San Simeon 40 miles.”

Happy motorists honked at them, and the Caltrans folks waved back. Nobody drove too fast, on this day at least. Caltrans and the Highway Patrol hope that lasts.

Jen Walker of Santa Cruz said the reopening “is a real big deal for me.”

That’s because her mother lives on the other side of the slide, in Cambria (San Luis Obispo County), and she missed her home cooking. She was preparing to set off, over the new road, to get some.

“I used to have to go all the way around to see Mom,” she said. “Not anymore.”

Business was picking up everyplace. The Ragged Point snack bar, just south of the slide, had a line again. And at the Phoenix Gift store at Big Sur, more tourists than last week were looking at the jade necklaces.

Opening up the road, said store manager Jaime Reed, officially brings to an end “the longest, most beautiful U-turn in the world.”

Big Sur had been accessible from the north. But the closed stretch meant that, for more than a year, southbound traffic had to turn around at the closure and retrace its tire tracks.

Gabe Mazurek, a host at the River Inn restaurant at Big Sur, said the road’s reopening will make it easier to get from Big Sur to Los Angeles, not necessarily a plus.

“Los Angeles is OK, but I think you’re better off here,” he said. “Actually, there’s no comparison.”

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF