Sea World/Zoo questions

[platypus67]

I'm planning my next DLR trip for Dec 09 and want to include San Diego Zoo and Sea World this time. We have to plan quite early as we usually use our frequent flyer points for our flights within North America. We will be heading on to Toronto from California and can either fly into LA and out of San Diego or in/out of LA.
Our options are to stay at DLR and do a couple of day trips to San Diego or to stay in DLR for first half of trip and then spend a few days in San Diego.
My questions are:
Is it possible to stay somewhere central (in San Diego) and get shuttles to both attractions or do we need to rent a car?
If we stay close to one attraction which is best for hotels.
Any info would be greatly appreciated.

 

[DCDisney]

I think you would really need to rent a car. We are doing half our trip in Anaheim and the other half in SD. Traffic between Anaheim and SD is terrible which would make day trips not very much fun. We are actually doing 3 segments SD, Anaheim, SD but we are staying at the Hyatt Regency Mission Bay which is beautiful and only 1 mile from sea world. Then when we go back for the 2nd part we are staying at Residence Inn (2 bedroom suite which will be very nice by the end of a long trip) san Diego/Carlsbad which is about 30 minutes North of SD but very close to legoland (1 mile away) and the SD Zoo Wild Animal Park is about 15 miles away. The car rental is actually very inexpensive-- we went through carrentals dot com. If you work things out ideally you can buy a ticket called southern california citypass (they have a city pass website that explains it) which includes 3 day DL park hoppers and 1 day sea world and the zoo or wild animal park for 1 day. It also includes 1 day at Universal Studios theme park.