Back at the beginning of the month Emee and I traveled to San Diego and spent a week there. We were facilitating a tech conference, the third one her company has done. This makes my third visit to the most SoCal of cities. The first time I passed through was in 2003, when S.D. was a stop on the Copy and Destroy zine tour. The second was in 2021 for the conference, and I didn’t go last year as I got COVID right before it.
San Diego is a fine city, but it’s not a place that I’d go out of my way to visit. If I was going to SoCal on my own, I’d rather go to LA. (A Los Angeles visit was originally planned for after the conference, but lack of time meant it was scrapped.) Oodles of sun, beach, and palm trees does have an appeal, true, though I would probably be into it more if we visited in January or February.1 It would be a nice contrast to the dreary Portland weather of November and December. But October was pretty nice in the Northwest, so the visit didn’t feel like a tonic.
This time I stayed in downtown San Diego, which was heaps better than the more isolated La Jolla area. I get the impression that people actually go to downtown San Diego and do stuff, which seems a lot different than L.A. I realize downtown Los Angeles has vastly improved and there are things to do (we stayed downtown in 2021), but because of decades of neglect and the general sprawly nature of the city, I’m guessing many Angelinos haven’t gone downtown in years. But San Diego has a ballpark and drinking districts in the heart of town, which means tourism. And it doesn’t hurt that downtown is right on San Diego Bay.
Oh yes, we did bring Bromptons, though we almost didn’t due to the hectic nature of the trip. But we added a couple free days for after the conference, and we spent them mostly riding around. On Saturday we visited Balboa Park and checked out the former grounds of the 1915 and 1935 World’s Fairs.
Sunday was a more involved ride, going from downtown to Ocean Beach to see the sunset, stopping by Liberty Station. We also had coffee while eating brunch at Harbor Breakfast, so this counted as Coffeeneuring 2023, Ride 6. It was a 9.2 mile/14.8 km ride total, and we made it to the beach with two minutes until the sun went behind the horizon. We also spotted a couple bike touring. I didn’t talk for long, as they didn’t seem to speak English that well, and they seemed like they were in the “get it done” mode, as it was maybe another 10 miles to the border, the technical end of the Pacific Coast Bike Route.2 But I’m always inspired when I see other cyclotourists. That was one of the big benefits of working at the hostel.
It was a fun little trip, and I’m sure I’ll be back to San Diego at some point.
- And San Diego is one of those places that really doesn’t have a winter, unless you consider longer (and slightly cooler) nights with a slight chance of rain “winter”. One thing I’ve noticed about places where there’s little-to-no seasonal variation: People who want to cosplay winter wardrobe will do it any time of year. There were a good amount of puffy jackets seen in San Diego during the day, when the high was like 77F/25C. ↩︎
- I’m guessing that 99% of Pacific Coast bike tourists stop right at the Mexico border. I don’t even think I’ve heard about anyone going to Tijuana, at least not with a loaded touring bike. Whereas there are many completists that start in Vancouver, BC, like these two tourists I saw. ↩︎
Urban Adventure League 