3 Perfect Days in San Diego: Day 1
3 Perfect Days in San Diego: Day 2
3 Perfect Days in San Diego: Day 3

This is Part 3 of our trip to San Diego – if you haven’t had a chance to read the previous parts, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

After a relaxing first day and a zoo-filled second day, we had one final day left to see other parts of San Diego. As I mentioned a little in Part 1, the core downtown area of San Diego is easily walkable, but the suburbs do spread out a pretty good distance. If you’re looking to jump around from suburb to suburb, a car would certainly be helpful, but if you’re staying downtown, parking is very expensive ($27+ per day), and gas is also more expensive than most areas.

San Diego has a light rail system that is clean, efficient, and comfortable for getting around downtown and the Gaslamp District. There is also a rather expansive city bus system, which we used to get to Ocean Beach. Most of the beach towns are north of downtown, and we took the light rail to Old Town San Diego, then connected to a bus to get to Ocean Beach. The Old Town station has both the light rail and buses all in the same place, so it’s a very convenient spot to transfer. After a 15 minute light rail and 20 minute bus ride, we found ourselves in the heart of Ocean Beach.

Ocean Beach is kind of a funky, artsy, hippy town:

There are a bunch of shops and restaurants concentrated within a few blocks stretching inland from the beach, where surfers are lining the waves. We had heard about a popular hamburger joint called Hodad’s:

We walked by there around 10:45, and a line was already starting to form at the entrance, so we walked down the beach a bit, and stopped off in some antique shops. We had lunch around 12:00, and the burgers were excellent. Since the somewhat hippy-feel wasn’t really our vibe, we decided to head back into town, and took the bus back towards Old Town San Diego:

While we couldn’t quite see it from the train station on the way in, Old Town San Diego was just a block away and once we got there, we realized that we’d enjoy our time much more walking around that area. There were a lot of historic shops and markets, restaurants with live music, and overall a bit more up-beat kind of feel. There were lots of people walking around, although it didn’t feel overly crowded. We went in and out of a few shops, buying some candy and some Mexican painted tiles that The Future Mrs. Guru creatively turned into coasters:

After we had seen most of the quaint Old Town San Diego, we hopped back on the light rail, and rode a few stops back towards town, deciding to make a quick detour to the Little Italy district when we realized it was right off one of the stops:

While we didn’t stay long, there looked to be lots of good Italian restaurants. We were tempted to come back there for dinner, but we had our plans set on getting some good seafood that night, so we ended up going to The Fish Market right on the harbor. We had the most amazing table, on the deck overlooking the water, and enjoyed a delicious dinner there:

After a great last evening, we made sure to set alarms for a bright and early 4:30 am wake up to catch our 6:20 am flight the next morning to fly back home.