We're going to be doing a similar strip in mid-August. It will be my wife and I and our 6.5 year old daughter.
Our plan so far:
Day 0) Fly into LAX on the evening of the 12th, stay someplace about 45 minutes closer to San Diego from LAX.
Days 1-4) Drive down to San Diego after about 10am on Friday (I'm told leaving earlier would be futile). Then we have 3 nights booked at the Westin Horton Plaza (Friday, Sat, Sun), which is what I think would be called downtown San Diego.
Hotels in San Diego are frustrating. We had really wanted to stay on the beach but trying to find a suitable hotel was driving me batty. We were originally interested in the Hotel Del Coronado. But it's rather pricey; we probably would have splurged, but there were enough scary reviews on the web to put us off. Any nice beach hotel I could find was either outrageously expensive, had a FOUR night minimum if the stay included a weekend night, or was booked. My wife has slept on a Heavenly Bed before and the Westin has a
AAA rate of $179/night. Valet parking (there's no self-parking) is $25/day, but aside from tax, there are no other hidden fees. I think all the "beach" hotels we looked at had extra resort fees. And though not cheap, the Westin is probably half the price of the "beach" hotels and I won't have to worry about threadbare linens and curtains or being made to feel like I exist to stay at their hotel instead of their hotel existing for me to stay in.
As for San Diego, we plan on visiting the beach though it may not be an all-day in-the-water visit. Also, judging from our own experience many years ago and the current convention wisdom is that visiting the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park should not be mutually exclusive. We're very likely to do both. We will NOT be doing
Legoland. SeaWorld is unlikely. My daughter was in a mood when we did SeaWorld in Orlando so we don't have a good bead on how much she really enjoyed it. We also have vague memories of really loving Balboa Park but can't remember specifics.
Day 4-5) On Monday, we'll head back towards LA at our leisure. If there's still stuff we want to do in SD, we'll hang around a bit, otherwise we'll head north for "extra-curricular" stuff around LA, though I'm not sure what that will be. My wife keeps trying to sell me on the LaBrea tar pits, but I'm not so sure. In any event, we have a Camp Snoopy room booked at the Knott's Berry Farm Resort Hotel that night. If we get in early enough, and Knott's Berry Farm is open late, we may do the "After 4pm" thing there. But we need to be back in the room by about 8pm, which is when Snoopy comes to tuck in.
Day 5-8) Early on Tuesday, we'll head over to a
Disneyland hotel, probably the Paradise Pier to check in for 4 nights. We're likely to just do Disneyland and CA these four days.
Day 9 (if you could call it that)) Wake up and head for LAX for 12:45pm flight home. Wah, wah.
In any event, I'm still open to hotel suggestions in the San Diego area and am also interested specific idea for things to do in both SD and LA.
Brett
