marcar12
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2012
I love reading trip reports, so I thought I would share one of my own! I hope it is helpful to someone planning to visit San Diego soon.
We are a family of 6, and we stayed in the Liberty Station area at the Homewood Suites hotel. We loved its location! It was right by a beachy area that we hung out at a few times and the kids collected big sea shells there. It was also pretty close to everything we wanted to do.
On our arrival day we visited Ocean Beach. It was my kids' first time ever at the ocean and they were in AWE. What a great way to start the trip.
The rest of our trip we visited Sea World (twice), Legoland, the San Diego Zoo, the Japanese Friendship Garden, and La Jolla Shores Beach. If anyone has any questions about these, feel free to let me know.
I highly recommend the Quick Queue/Reserved Seating at Sea World! We went on a Saturday and a Wednesday, and to my surprise the Wed was actually much busier than Saturday! We had been planning to not use Quick Queue passes on the Wed, but we changed our minds after we got there and saw how long the lines were (65 min for Manta, 90 min for Journey to Atlantis, etc.) We all loved Sea World. The shows were so much fun, the rides were great, Dine With Orcas was a great lunch, Electric Ocean at night was cool, and the animals were amazing. My 8-year-old son said he liked it better than Disney World, and the rest of us liked it pretty equally to Disney!
We bought the Reserve N Ride passes for Legoland, but ended up feeling like they weren't really necessary. This probably varies a lot depending on the day you visit though (we were there on a Sunday.) Lines were short most places that we went. Walked right up to a pizza place for lunch and easily found tables in the shade to sit at. This was probably the least crowded day that we experienced of our trip. The new Lego Movie World is fabulous! Great rides!
La Jolla Shores and Ocean Beach both have insane situations for parking. I really wish there was a better system for that! Both had very busy parking lots with people aggressively driving around looking for spots when anyone miraculously left. And the bathrooms were sooooo sooo SO disgusting. But other than those 2 negative factors, we really loved visiting the beaches. They were gorgeous, the waves were perfect, and the water was surprisingly warm!
The Japanese Friendship Garden was beautiful. I am glad we went there as a low-key way to spend an hour or two.
The Zoo was wonderful, as expected! We loved seeing unique animals like the red pandas, wombats, fennec foxes, lemurs, koalas, and so much more. Lines here were long for food and the guided bus tour. We actually were not impressed with the bus tour and if we ever go again we will skip this. We like being able to stand and look at the animals for as long as we want and we missed being able to read the signs with info about each animal. About 50% of the animals were not viewable when we happened to drive by, so we ended up going back to same areas again by foot, so it didn't save us any time. This is very much a YMMV experience, but for us it was no worth the wait in line to ride. Also we were sad there were no shows going on. I think there normally are shows, but sadly they haven't started again since reopening. The minor disappointments were definitely not a big deal though, and we were very happy with the zoo overall.
One thing I was unprepared for was the long waits at restaurants throughout San Diego. I wasn't expecting 45+ minute waits almost everywhere we went, even on a Tuesday. With young hungry children waiting more than about 20 minutes for a dinner table can be quite a headache. I am not sure what we could have done differently with this though because everywhere we went they said that they couldn't do a reservation and that we would have to walk in before getting our names on the wait list. But I do wish we would have at least been mentally prepared for that situation.
Overall we had a fantastic vacation and I am so glad we were able to finally do it! (We were supposed to go last summer but Covid messed up that plan!) Tons of awesome memories were made!
We are a family of 6, and we stayed in the Liberty Station area at the Homewood Suites hotel. We loved its location! It was right by a beachy area that we hung out at a few times and the kids collected big sea shells there. It was also pretty close to everything we wanted to do.
On our arrival day we visited Ocean Beach. It was my kids' first time ever at the ocean and they were in AWE. What a great way to start the trip.
The rest of our trip we visited Sea World (twice), Legoland, the San Diego Zoo, the Japanese Friendship Garden, and La Jolla Shores Beach. If anyone has any questions about these, feel free to let me know.
I highly recommend the Quick Queue/Reserved Seating at Sea World! We went on a Saturday and a Wednesday, and to my surprise the Wed was actually much busier than Saturday! We had been planning to not use Quick Queue passes on the Wed, but we changed our minds after we got there and saw how long the lines were (65 min for Manta, 90 min for Journey to Atlantis, etc.) We all loved Sea World. The shows were so much fun, the rides were great, Dine With Orcas was a great lunch, Electric Ocean at night was cool, and the animals were amazing. My 8-year-old son said he liked it better than Disney World, and the rest of us liked it pretty equally to Disney!
We bought the Reserve N Ride passes for Legoland, but ended up feeling like they weren't really necessary. This probably varies a lot depending on the day you visit though (we were there on a Sunday.) Lines were short most places that we went. Walked right up to a pizza place for lunch and easily found tables in the shade to sit at. This was probably the least crowded day that we experienced of our trip. The new Lego Movie World is fabulous! Great rides!
La Jolla Shores and Ocean Beach both have insane situations for parking. I really wish there was a better system for that! Both had very busy parking lots with people aggressively driving around looking for spots when anyone miraculously left. And the bathrooms were sooooo sooo SO disgusting. But other than those 2 negative factors, we really loved visiting the beaches. They were gorgeous, the waves were perfect, and the water was surprisingly warm!
The Japanese Friendship Garden was beautiful. I am glad we went there as a low-key way to spend an hour or two.
The Zoo was wonderful, as expected! We loved seeing unique animals like the red pandas, wombats, fennec foxes, lemurs, koalas, and so much more. Lines here were long for food and the guided bus tour. We actually were not impressed with the bus tour and if we ever go again we will skip this. We like being able to stand and look at the animals for as long as we want and we missed being able to read the signs with info about each animal. About 50% of the animals were not viewable when we happened to drive by, so we ended up going back to same areas again by foot, so it didn't save us any time. This is very much a YMMV experience, but for us it was no worth the wait in line to ride. Also we were sad there were no shows going on. I think there normally are shows, but sadly they haven't started again since reopening. The minor disappointments were definitely not a big deal though, and we were very happy with the zoo overall.
One thing I was unprepared for was the long waits at restaurants throughout San Diego. I wasn't expecting 45+ minute waits almost everywhere we went, even on a Tuesday. With young hungry children waiting more than about 20 minutes for a dinner table can be quite a headache. I am not sure what we could have done differently with this though because everywhere we went they said that they couldn't do a reservation and that we would have to walk in before getting our names on the wait list. But I do wish we would have at least been mentally prepared for that situation.
Overall we had a fantastic vacation and I am so glad we were able to finally do it! (We were supposed to go last summer but Covid messed up that plan!) Tons of awesome memories were made!
