When it is a rainy cold day in Seattle like today and you know that this kind of weather will be almost every day for the next half a year or so, it is nice to recall one of our trips to sunny and warm places. San Diego, California is one of those warm and sunny places. And it happens to be one of the closest places to fly for the sun from Seattle. It is around three to four hours away on a plane.
The image above is Coronado resort in San Diego area. All images in this post were taken with my old Samsung S20 FE phone before I had drowned it earlier this year on our trip to Northern California.
As you can see Coronado beach is quite popular, you can rent the chairs and sun umbrellas to make yourself more comfortable and control how much of the strong California sun you want to absorb.
The water was nice and warm that day on August 25, 2025. I was reluctant at first to go into the water, but our daughter talked me into going into it a little bit and then in no time at all I was playing in the waves with her holding on to me. She is a pretty good swimmer, but when it comes to the ocean waves she really prefers to hold on to me at all times.
The ocean in San Diego is much warmer than it is in Seattle area, it is the same Pacific Ocean, but it feels much colder in Seattle and the water itself looks much different, it is much darker in Seattle area than in California.
In addition to playing in the water and enjoying the sand and sun we visited the historic Coronado Hotel and stopped by our favorite ice cream place at the Hotel Del Coronado.
The whole area around Coronado Hotel is really nice and as you can see people like to throw coins into the fountain pond to come back and enjoy this wonderful place.
San Diego has many fun things to do with the kids, one of those things is San Diego Zoo Safari Park, not to be confused with the San Diego Zoo. The Safari Park is a short Uber ride away from the San Diego itself and is much larger in size than San Diego Zoo.
San Diego Zoo Safari Park offers a nice walk through the tropical landscape with an opportunity to see a variety of birds and animals. Some of the animals that we got to see were: elephants, gorillas, giraffe, rhinos, etc.
Rhinoceros were impressive, but our favorite animals were giraffe as they approached close to us and were really fun to see.
Elephants were also fun to see, but they were not approaching close to the humans so we had to enjoy them from the distance
It was our first visit to San Diego Zoo Safari Park and we really enjoyed it:
When there is so much to see in a place like San Diego, you get back to your hotel completely exhausted every evening and it is nice to have a view from your room. In this case we had a view on the night city of San Diego and commercial airplanes that were landing every fifteen minutes or so:
You could see the planes during the day also as you can see in the image below:
Another place that is fun to visit and easy to spend the whole day at is USS Midway Museum
This museum is an actual American aircraft carrier. The size of this ship is astonishing, it is like a small floating town and there is a lot to see.
We spent hours visiting it and left after we got really tired of walking around and we didn't even get to see everything.
After visiting the museum we walked to the restaurant on the waterfront that you can see in this picture. It was very pleasant and it was fun to sit outside on the water, but it didn't make it into our San Diego food favorites
One of our old time San Diego restaurant favorites is Nobu that is located in the same building as the Hard Rock Hotel San Diego:
We have been to San Diego at least three times as a family and a few more times besides that. San Diego is definitely one of our West Coast favorite cities. Right now sitting in a rainy Seattle, I wish I was in San Diego.
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