Four days in San Diego: the border city that acts like a beach town

Everything on the first afternoon is along a mile of waterfront, so this works whatever time you land.

The USS Midway is moored at Navy Pier and is the obvious place to start. She was commissioned a week after the Second World War ended, served until 1992 and was the flagship in the Gulf, and you tour her yourself with an audio guide narrated by former crew. Below decks are the galleys, the brig and the bunk rooms; on the flight deck are around thirty aircraft you can walk between. Two and a half hours, and children will want longer.

Ten minutes north along the promenade is the maritime museum, which is a row of ships rather than a building. The Star of India was launched in 1863, is the oldest active sailing ship in the world and still goes to sea; there is also an 1898 steam ferry, a Soviet submarine and a replica of the frigate from the Master and Commander films.

Then walk inland into the Gaslamp Quarter for the evening. Sixteen blocks of Victorian commercial buildings that were a red light district within living memory and are now the busiest bar and restaurant district in southern California. It is rowdy on a Saturday and pleasant on a Tuesday.

Balboa Park is 1,200 acres of canyons and Spanish colonial pavilions built for an exposition in 1915, and the city kept the buildings afterwards and filled them with institutions. It holds sixteen museums, several gardens, a theatre and the zoo, and a whole day here is not enough.

Start at the zoo, at opening. It has around 4,000 animals and it earned its reputation by putting them in open moated enclosures in the 1920s, decades before that was normal. The site is a canyon, so it is hillier than expected; take the bus tour first to get oriented, then walk back to whatever you want to see properly. Three to four hours.

Come out into the park in the afternoon and slow right down. The Botanical Building is a slatted timber structure from the same 1915 exposition, with a lily pond in front of it that is the most photographed spot in San Diego.

Finish at the organ pavilion, which has one of the largest outdoor pipe organs in the world under a curved stone shell. There is a free concert every Sunday afternoon and it has run since 1917, which makes it the longest-running series of its kind. Sit on a bench in the sun and listen.

West today, out along the peninsula that shelters the bay. A car helps; the bus takes an hour.

Cabrillo National Monument is at the very tip, on the spot where Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo landed in 1542 and became the first European on this coast. The old lighthouse on the ridge above is four hundred feet up, kept as it was in the 1880s, and the view takes in the ocean on one side and the harbour, the airport, the city and the mountains of Mexico on the other. Down at sea level on the western shore there are tidepools that are worth timing around a low tide.

Then drive north along the cliffs. Sunset Cliffs is a two mile stretch of eroding sandstone above the Pacific, with a road along the top and paths down to coves, and the name is not marketing: this is where the city comes to watch the sun go down. Stay back from the edge, which is undercut and collapses.

In the late afternoon, cut inland to Old Town, which is where the Spanish settlement was before the city moved to the bay. It is a state park of adobes and Victorian houses now, with the Whaley House at the top of it: the first brick building in San Diego, built in 1856 over the site of a gallows, used as a courthouse and a theatre, and widely advertised as the most haunted house in America.

North for the last morning, to La Jolla, which is a village of sandstone bluffs and expensive houses about twenty minutes up the coast and looks nothing like the rest of the city.

La Jolla Cove is a small beach set into the cliffs with clear water over a protected marine reserve, so it is full of snorkellers and the occasional sea lion. The grass on the bluff above it is the best picnic spot in San Diego and the view runs the length of the coast.

Five minutes south along the walkway is the Children's Pool, which is a curved sea wall built in 1931 to make a sheltered beach for children and has since been taken over entirely by harbour seals, who pup there between December and May. The beach closes to people for that season and there has been a long-running and thoroughly local argument about it ever since. Watch from the wall.

Then the airport, twenty-five minutes south, or the drive back up to Los Angeles, which is about two hours forty on the motorway and rather longer and much better along the old coast road.