By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Keep it simple, limit theme parks and bring along a secret weapon. That is how my wife and I managed to vacation for seven days in San Diego with our two young children and never once (well, once at SeaWorld) lost our sanity.
This city challenges parental sanity because it offers children an almost endless list of things to do.
Some are astoundingly frivolous, such as strolling the faux Las Vegas Strip at Legoland, complete with an exploding volcano in front of a Mirage Hotel, all built out of more than 2 million plastic bricks. Some are rich with scientific wonder, such as "tidepooling" tours offered by naturalists at the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And some offer memories that just might change a kid's outlook on the world, such as when children are asked to perform with African tribesmen in a rain dance at the San Diego Zoo's Elephant Show Amphitheater.
Parents with little kids, though, have to be careful not to overreach. We are semi-hostage to nap time and quiet time, tantrums and problematic potty events. This, then, is a story about discovering San Diego in carefully controlled doses, while lavishing time and love on the little darlings -- and, almost as important, escaping their sticky clutches now and then. As a family living in Seattle, we had dreamed for what seemed like a lifetime about an escape to Southern California: the sun, the warmth, the glorious absence of concrete-colored clouds squatting on our souls.
Much of the fun of going away with very young children is fantasizing wildly about it with them for months in advance. The words "San Diego" became a cure-all incantation in our house. My wife and I ended sibling fights and soothed boo-boos by talking about how much better everything would be when we arrived.
Our daughter, Lucinda, 4, filled in the fantasies with insider dope. Her well-traveled preschool friends briefed her on what to buy at SeaWorld and Legoland. She talked about the theme parks like a travel agent getting kickbacks.
Our son, Arno, like many politically correct 2-year-olds in the Pacific Northwest, was focused on orcas, the playful and endangered beasts that live wild in Puget Sound. We had discussed what it would be like to see them as captives at SeaWorld.
Flying south early on a Saturday, the kids were deliriously excited. When they said "San Diego," they seemed to be saying "Neverland." (I must admit we had been hitting Peter Pan books and videos pretty hard in the months before the flight. A day before we left, I was talking on the telephone with a colleague from work when Arno, wielding a rubber sword and wearing an eye patch, barged in, crawled into my lap and asked who was on the phone. "My friend Peter," I said. "Pan?" he asked.) What with all the anticipation, when we finally saw San Diego harbor from the air -- the big naval ships and the sun-dappled waters -- Arno seemed let down. From the air, he had been expecting to see leaping orcas. "I am sad," he said.
In nearly every other respect, though, San Diego delivered on our expectations. There were two reasons for this:
We did not do too much. We took only two day-long outings with the kids -- to SeaWorld and the San Diego Zoo. We lost one and won one -- but more about that later.
The second reason San Diego worked so well for us was our secret weapon, which we smuggled in from out of state: Grandma, together with her husband, also known as Granddaddy.
They were waiting for us in the San Diego airport, having swooped in that morning from their home in Denver. They are frequent visitors to our house in Seattle and much loved by our kids.
Since we wanted to keep it simple and maximize the amount of fun and relaxation we could have while staying close to a refrigerator stocked with sippy cups, we spent the biggest chunk of our vacation money on accommodations. We had decided that a hotel would be too constraining -- without being all that cheap. Spending $200 to $300 per night for two suites (for our family and my wife's parents) would add up.
We also worried that if we spent a week in a hotel, we would feel compelled to drive somewhere every day -- to pricey theme parks, crowded public beaches or fancy restaurants where the kids would spurn the complicated food -- just to keep from going crazy. We decided we would rather spend that money to rent a nice place where we would not feel pressured to rush out the door.
In the end, we settled on a $2,500 waterfront townhouse with four bedrooms (two of them with king-size beds) and a large, well-equipped kitchen in a gated community in Leucadia, 30 miles north of San Diego. We booked it three months in advance and rented a minivan for the week ($400).
With a big airy home base (one that was filled with the sound of surf) it was easy to establish routines that Lucinda and Arno could find comfort in. There was, of course, a price to pay: We were far away from downtown San Diego -- and its restaurants, museums and shops. But the kids did not care and neither did we. When they are older, we will come back and be sophisticated.
The truth is that much of our vacation, the parts that seemed to make our kids most happy, could have occurred in any beach community where the sun is warm and the breezes gentle. This is a truth that more travelers with young kids should grasp, I think, before buying those tickets for Bali.
With the surf pounding outside our open bedroom window, the kids joined me in bed for a dramatic reading of "Ms. Frizzle's Adventure: Medieval Castle," while my wife escaped by herself to the beach.
Every morning shortly after dawn, a time when Arno likes to wake up and demonstrate his hollering skills, he and I went exploring. We discovered the Leucadia Donut Shop, a '50's-era roadside emporium of caloric excess. At sticky tables, I drank cheap coffee and devoured the Los Angeles Times. Arno sat beside me, smeared a chocolate sprinkle doughnut over much of his face, chugged milk and jabbered with sugar-charged confidence about world affairs as he knows them: pirates, swords, orcas and mankind's urgent need to eat just one more chocolate sprinkle doughnut.
Within the gated community, we took long, lazy trips on foot to a well-heated pool. We whacked a tennis ball around empty courts. We made sand castles on the beach and exposed our pale Seattle feet to the cold California surf. There was a gas barbecue at the condo, and we cooked mostly kid stuff -- hot dogs and burgers.
The presence of grandparents allowed my wife and me to read --yes, actually read -- books in the same dwelling with kids who were not unconscious. That presence also allowed us to make periodic prison breaks. The most memorable was dinner in nearby Cardiff. At Charlie's by the Sea, the sea bass is excellent. We sat at a table that looked out on the Pacific, with wet-suited surfers silhouetted in light that faded from yellow to red to gunmetal gray.
We did, of course, get in the minivan and partake of the "family fun" that lured us to San Diego. Our first trip was to SeaWorld, the marine mammal park, and it was a decidedly mixed experience.
We had budgeted for the considerable expense: $230 for four adults, parking and one child. (Arno got in free.) And we were all impressed by the professionalism of the sea lions, dolphins and orcas, each performing in their own stadiums with skilled, fit and informative handlers.
But for first-time visitors with kids in tow, SeaWorld was confusing and stressful. We struggled through large crowds (on a Monday, no less) to find seats in the right stadium at the proper time. At midday, between the sea lion and dolphin shows, as we tried to eat the sandwiches and fruit slices we'd prepared that morning in the condo, we discovered that SeaWorld had thoughtfully provided . . . virtually no place to sit down.
With the exception of a few benches near the park's entrance and tables and chairs inside various restaurants, there seemed to be no seating at all for families with small, cranky kids. We ended up having our lunch while sitting on a curb near some sea turtles. It was Arno's nap time and he was sniveling. (I can't blame that on SeaWorld.) Lucinda noisily insisted that she "needed" to buy a stuffed dolphin. (I can blame that on SeaWorld.) My wife and I were bickering about what to do to make the kids happy. (And why not blame that on SeaWorld? We were paying $230, after all, to lunch on a curb.)
Once our collective hunger had been quashed, we calmed down and found our way to the dolphin and orca shows. Both were memorable. In Dolphin Stadium, there was an extraordinary display of athleticism by a high-jumping bottlenose dolphin named Dolly. But the orca show in Shamu Stadium, which is the stage name that SeaWorld gives to all its orcas, was hard to stomach -- at least for my wife and me. (I should concede, though, that the kids loved it.) Back in the Pacific Northwest, we have watched orcas at play in Puget Sound. They are among the most family-oriented of mammals, traveling together for decades in pods with their mothers. (Female orcas can live into their 90s.)
At SeaWorld, an announcer spoke of the "wondrous connection" between orcas and humans. Several handlers zipped around a very large fish tank, riding orcas like water bikes. But there was no mention that these performances would not be possible without having kidnapped some orcas from their families. (SeaWorld announced in 1995 that it would no longer capture them, and has since successfully bred them.) Nor was their any mention that orcas in captivity tend to die at younger ages than in the wild.
After SeaWorld we spent another delightful day doing not much of anything, then we piled back into the minivan and went to the zoo. The San Diego Zoo is one of the world's largest, with 4,000 animals spread over 100 acres, and yet it is quite manageable with little kids -- if you don't do too much.
We went on a Wednesday and it was much less crowded than SeaWorld -- and considerably cheaper. Parking was free and so was Arno's admission. The cost for four adults and one child came to $154.
The zoo offers guided bus tours (an excellent idea, if walking a couple of miles is not feasible). But we wanted to pick and choose our animals -- and have the option to escape if tantrums blew in. So we rented a two-kid stroller.
Besides its size and variety, what distinguishes San Diego's zoo from just about every zoo in the world is its class. The gorillas have a rain forest with a roaring waterfall. The pandas have 40 varieties of bamboo. Tropical birds zip around inside one of the world's largest free-flight aviaries. For homo sapiens from Seattle, there were lots of outdoor tables where we could sit, eat and discuss the finer points of gorilla breath and elephant poop. An unexpected pleasure -- and one that stands in sharp contrast to my last visit to the National Zoo -- was the short line to see the four pandas.
We spent five contented hours that ended when an elephant used his trunk to shower himself and us with dirt. We brushed ourselves off and headed for the minivan. The kids napped all the way back to our condo. That left two more utterly unscheduled -- and tantrum-free -- days of fooling around at the beach and at the pool.
We were all heartbroken to go home. With little kids, it pays to keep it simple.
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