SAN DIEGO

San Diego offers such an array of sites and neighborhoods to see, from gorgeous ocean views and scientific discovery to beautifully maintained architecture and military installations.

There is no better way to experience all of it than on foot, moving through the stories at your own pace. Balboa Park is a beautiful collection of Spanish Colonial towers, grand promenades, and ornate archways built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition.

Today that same architecture houses world-class museums, the largest outdoor pipe organ on Earth, and a zoo that was born entirely by accident when a surgeon heard lions roaring from the fairgrounds. Are you curious why a library named after Dr. Seuss looks like a spaceship from science fiction? Or why a Nobel Prize-winning research institute was built with volcanic ash from ancient Rome? Why a 1,084-foot research pier has been measuring ocean temperatures without interruption since 1916.

The Edge of Everything tour through La Jolla has all of that and so much more, finishing on a clifftop 300 feet above the Pacific where hang gliders peel silently off the edge into the open sky. Then there is the waterfront. Seaport Village is a 14-acre bayside marketplace sitting on land that was once a mudflat tidal basin transformed into one of San Diego’s most beloved gathering places.

There’s the USS Midway, a 1,001-foot aircraft carrier that served the United States Navy for 47 remarkable years, longer than any other carrier of the 20th century. Just steps from the Midway sits the Unconditional Surrender statue, a 25-foot bronze recreation of the famous 1945 V-J Day photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. The original photograph was taken the day World War II ended.

Whatever tour you choose, you will be immersed in sunshine, rich history, and good vibes. San Diego is most famous for exactly that.