I plan on staying near Balboa Park. How far is the drive/walk/coaster ride to the coast/beach? What is best to take, trolley/coaster, car or on foot? Answer all please. Thanks!|||Stay in the Gaslamp Quarter. There are many nice hotels there and many nightspots for drinks and dancing. Also there are many choices of restaurants to eat at. http://www.gaslampdistricthotels.com/ Let me explain to you how the city is layed out. At the foot of Broadway there is the Embarcadero which is San Diego Bay. It is, like another said, a harbor full of cruise ships, dinner-cruise yachts and the floating Midway aircraft carrier museum. It is not a swimmable beach. It is primarily docks designed for accomodating the movement of sea going freight. It's an interesting sight to see, but again it is not made for swimming or human water contact. The Gaslamp Quarter is about eight blocks from the harbor. Balboa Park is about 20 blocks from the harbor. Your best bet to get to Balboa Park from the Gaslamp area is to board a bus on Broadway and get off at the Balboa Park/SD Zoo stop. Buy the all day bus pass for $5 or take a cab. I'd take the bus if I were you. http://www.balboapark.org/visit/directio鈥?/a> You don't want to walk to Balboa Park for three reasons. 1) It gets very hilly the last 7 blocks. 2) At 10th Avenue there is a lot of speeding traffic because it is the exit from Highway 163. 3) After about 10th Avenue it sort of turns ghetto or just doesn't look like a nice area to be walking in alone. Balboa Park itself is a really nice place and is well spaced from the urban areas surrounding it. http://www.google.com/maphp?hl=en&tab=wl鈥?/a>|||You'll either want to drive or take the bus (not walk, Balboa Park is too far from the beach and it's perched on a hill, a fairly significant hill)... I would drive if it were me...San Diego, for a big city, is fairly easy to get around... and although the entire city lies along the coastline, there are several areas that are NOT accessible for swimming. The downtown beach area, just west of Balboa Park, is the harbor where all the cruise ships and the Maritime/Midway museums are, also Seaport Village as well, so there's no access for beach swimming to the public. FROM BALBOA PARK, here are some directions to some of the public access beaches: CORONADO: Hop on the 5 fwy South, exit Coronado Bay Bridge/75, after you've dared to drive over the bridge, turn left on Orange Ave (this will take you all the way to the Hotel del Coronado) and you can park along the small residential streets just before the hotel...really beautiful beaches there. There's a good pizza place, Village Pizzeria on Orange Ave & Churchill, they have the best Bleu Cheese Wedge Salad...yummmm! OCEAN BEACH: Take 5 fwy North, then the 8 fwy West till it ends, the a left on Sunset Cliffs, and a right on Newport. ...and from Ocean Beach, you can just drive around and end up at other beach areas. If you drive south, you'll be in Sunset Cliffs, pretty with lots of small trails. If you drive north, you'll end up in areas like Pacific Beach and La Jolla (which La Jolla, in my opinion is the most beautiful of all beaches, smooth rock bluffs, hilly, and if you drive slightly inland it gives a rustic mountaineer feeling with all the gorgeous pines).|||Just get an all day pass for $5 and take the bus. It's a few miles away but you want to save your energy for walking on the coast and through the park.|||8 miles to the beach 3 miles to san diego bay.

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