Exploring San Diego: A Spring Break Adventure Beyond Florida

SAN DIEGO, California – "Do people in San Diego ever get tired of the sunshine?" I asked my daughter, as we squinted through glare on the glass to spot one of two giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo. I wasn’t kidding. If I lived every day with such relentlessly gorgeous weather, I’m sure I’d find a reason to complain. But for seven days this month, it was glorious.

For more than half a century, I’ve traveled south to Florida for spring break. This year, I headed west instead. This is not a permanent break with the Sunshine State. But my parents, who lived on Sanibel Island for more than a decade, are gone, and the pull to Florida has quieted. This year, I was game for a different beach destination – and I found one, in San Diego.

Among the highlights: the renowned San Diego Zoo, hiking at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, the seals and sea lions of La Jolla, Coronado, Pacific Beach, and lots more. It was my first trip to America’s Finest City, a nickname coined in the 1970s, with an average annual high temperature of about 70 degrees and just 41 days of rain. I could get used to that.

Unfortunately, Cleveland no longer has nonstop flights to San Diego, the eighth largest city in the United States. I flew into Las Vegas instead – a five-hour drive from San Diego – and added a couple of national parks to my trip. Here, then, is how I spent my sunny days in San Diego:

First, a history lesson. For a crash course in San Diego’s past, we headed first to Point Loma, a dramatic peninsula west of downtown. It was here, five decades after Christopher Columbus first landed in the Americas, that Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo stepped ashore on what would become San Diego. The expedition would eventually claim more than 800 miles of coastline for Spain.

The tip of the peninsula is now a stunning park, part of the National Park Service’s Cabrillo National Monument, with a statue that pays tribute to the explorer, a 19th-century lighthouse, a military history exhibit, coastal trails, and sweeping ocean views.

From Point Loma, we traveled a few miles northeast to Old Town, where San Diego’s early history comes to life. The Old Town San Diego State Historic Park includes about two dozen structures – some original, some reconstructed – that chronicle the decades when California transitioned from Spanish colony to part of Mexico to the 31st U.S. state in 1850.

Many of the buildings are open to tour; some offer goods for sale, including La Casa de Rodriguez, a one-room adobe that is now Racine & Laramie, which bills itself as San Diego’s first cigar store. After an hour or so of wandering, my husband and I stopped for an early dinner at Old Town Mexican Café, where we watched women hand-roll tortillas before sitting down to the first of several excellent Mexican meals during the trip.

Our brief history lesson complete, it was time to hit the beach. On our second day in town, we headed north to the neighborhood of La Jolla, the posh waterfront community known for its rugged coastline, popular with both two-legged and marine mammals. La Jolla’s Children’s Pool is a small, protected beach that was originally intended to be a swimming area for kids. But then the harbor seals discovered it. Every year, the beach closes to humans during harbor seal pupping season, from December 15 through May 15. We stopped by in early March to observe dozens of the marine mamas lounging with their pups on the sand.

A bit farther north on the shoreline is La Jolla Cove, another small, beautiful beach, this one inhabited by sea lions. Humans are allowed in the water here, and several intrepid snorkelers were gearing up to head into La Jolla Bay. The water here is part of the San Diego La Jolla Underwater Park Ecological Reserve, a 6,000-acre underwater park that is popular with divers, snorkelers, and kayakers.

We continued north to Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, a gorgeous 2,000-acre park that features one of the wildest stretches of coastline in Southern California. The park offers eight miles of hiking trails through a forest of rare Torrey pines, most of which lead to a spectacular stretch of beach. Don’t miss it.

On day three, we headed to the San Diego Zoo, frequently touted as one of the nation’s very best zoos (with a price to match, at $73 for adult admission on the day of our visit). It lived up to the hype. The zoo is part of Balboa Park, the 1,200-acre cultural zone just east of downtown that includes more than a dozen museums, gardens, and recreational facilities. You could spend an entire week exploring the park’s many attractions. But we had only a day, and we spent it roaming the zoo, which doubles as a lush botanical garden.

Among the highlights was Panda Ridge, home to two giant pandas, Yun Chuan and Xin Bao, who relocated from China to Southern California in June 2024. The San Diego Zoo is one of only two places in the United States to see these black-and-white beauties. The other is the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. San Diego has a long history of hosting pandas, dating back to the mid-1990s. The zoo, however, had been panda-less for five years, starting in 2019, until the much-anticipated arrivals of Yun Chuan and Xin Bao.

After six hours in the zoo, we explored some of the rest of Balboa Park, which hosted two world’s fairs over the past 100-plus years (in 1915-16 and again in 1935-36) and has the ornate architecture to prove it.

On our final full day in town, we headed south to Coronado, the beachfront town across San Diego Bay from downtown, home to one of California’s most famous beaches. Coronado is a peninsula, not an island, and its northern half is dominated by Naval Air Station North Island, part of Naval Base Coronado, the West Coast’s naval hub for more than a century.

We were more interested in historic hotels than military history, however. So we headed for the Hotel del Coronado, a grand structure built in 1888 and expanded many times since. Today, the resort encompasses nearly 1,000 guestrooms and suites, more than a dozen restaurants and shops, a spa, pool, and much more.

We stopped first at the small Ice House Museum, which traces the history of the hotel, with displays on dining and dishware, ownership changes, and celebrity guests (including, most famously, Marilyn Monroe, who filmed “Some Like It Hot” here). Then we wandered through the two-story lobby, lined with original Illinois white oak paneling, before settling at the Sun Deck bar for $22 piña coladas.

A planned beach walk was cut short, however, in part because of signs on the sand to stay out of the water due to sewage and chemical contamination, caused by raw sewage flowing north from the Tijuana River in Mexico. Contamination on the Coronado Beach has been a persistent and growing problem, according to a lifeguard I spoke with, who said the water is closed more often than it’s open. The government, reportedly, is working on the problem.

We based our stay in Pacific Beach, a lively neighborhood north of downtown, popular with surfers and spring breakers. It was an ideal home base, steps from the water, with plenty of restaurants nearby and within a short drive of the city’s top sites. Pacific Beach and neighboring Mission Beach are side-by-side oceanfront communities, connected by a three-mile paved boardwalk that is popular day and night with walkers, runners, cyclists, singers, skateboarders, and scooters.

One morning, we rented bikes and pedaled the length of the boardwalk, then looped around Mission Bay, an inland waterway lined with parks and high-end housing. The ocean was cold during our stay – a brisk 61 degrees, according to one posting – and I never got wet past my knees. But plenty of wetsuit-wearing surfers were fully immersed, as were some crazy kids. The air temperature, however, was just about perfect, fluctuating between 70 and 75 degrees, with sunrise to sunset glare in my eyes. I kept my sunglasses close at hand.

For more on visiting San Diego, check out sandiego.org. My trip has shown me that there’s more to spring break than the beaches of Florida. With its rich history, stunning landscapes, and vibrant culture, San Diego is a destination that deserves a spot on everyone’s travel list.