Coronado Peninsula stretches across the harbor from downtown. It is a beach resort community that offers a wide assortment of recreational activities like swimming, boating and fishing and many resort hotels. Mission Bay, just north of downtown, has an extensive shorefront park with two family amusement facilities: Sea World and Belmont Park. The "Old Town" section of San Diego to the northeast includes six square blocks of historic buildings restored to their colonial splendor. There are a lot of restaurants, clubs, boutiques and souvenir shops in the Old Town area. A bit further north along the shore lies the beautiful seaside community of La Jolla with its up-scale shops and exclusive hillside homes.
What to see in San Diego
Any trip to San Diego should include a visit to the beaches on Coronado Peninsula and a stroll through the historic Coronado hotel. Balboa Park can occupy several days of sightseeing in the numerous museums and the world-renown Zoo. A trip to old town San Diego including a tour of the Junipero Serra museum and the reconstructed Mission San Diego will occupy another day. Add a boat excursion around the harbor, a stroll along the embarcadero, and a walking tour of the Gas Lamp Quarter, and you will have spent an enjoyable week touring beautiful San Diego. For the more adventuresome, there are fishing excursions, hot air balloon rides, and even air-combat experiences.
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San Diego, California
San Diego is in southern California near the Mexican border
Museum of Man - Balboa Park
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San Diego lies along the southern coast of California near the Mexican border. It is 125 miles (200 km) south of Los Angeles and about 600 miles (1.000 km) south of San Francisco. It is situated along the shores of a large bay sheltered behind several low-lying peninsulas. This great natural harbor enticed the Spanish missionary Father Junipero Serra to found the first of his series of 21 missions here in 1769. During the Second World War, the US Navy established its primary Pacific naval base and naval airfield at San Diego.
San Diego offers a very pleasant climate and relaxed atmosphere
Today, San Diego is the second largest city in California. It is a large modern metropolitan center, a year-around tourist resort and a thriving commercial seaport with a large naval base. Despite its size, San Diego seems less congested and frenzied than Los Angeles. It has a very hospitable climate with comfortable temperatures in all seasons. During the winter, days are usually warm and sunny and the nights are cool. In the summer, a pleasant breeze off of the Pacific Ocean moderates the heat from the tropical sun. It does not suffer from the problems of air pollution, which plague Los Angeles.
San Diego has spread north and south along the coast and eastward into the foothills of the mountains and now encompasses several distinct communities. Downtown San Diego is a combination of high-rise hotels, modern office buildings and a restored "Gas Lamp Quarter". Here, you will find a large convention center alongside an extensive yacht basin, several unique shopping centers and a wide assortment of restaurants, bars and clubs. Balboa Park, on the eastern hills skirting downtown, offers a wide assortment of museums, cultural attractions and one of the best zoos in the USA. San Diego International Airport is located near the downtown section of the city.
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Coronado Peninsula beaches provide a resort across the harbors
Coronado Peninsula stretches across the harbor from downtown. It is a beach resort community that offers a wide assortment of recreational activities like swimming, boating and fishing and many resort hotels. Mission Bay, just north of downtown, has an extensive shorefront park with two family amusement facilities: Sea World and Belmont Park. The "Old Town" section of San Diego to the northeast includes six square blocks of historic buildings restored to their colonial splendor. There are a lot of restaurants, clubs, boutiques and souvenir shops in the Old Town area. A bit further north along the shore lies the beautiful seaside community of La Jolla with its up-scale shops and exclusive hillside homes.
What to see in San Diego
Any trip to San Diego should include a visit to the beaches on Coronado Peninsula and a stroll through the historic Coronado hotel. Balboa Park can occupy several days of sightseeing in the numerous museums and the world-renown Zoo. A trip to old town San Diego including a tour of the Junipero Serra museum and the reconstructed Mission San Diego will occupy another day. Add a boat excursion around the harbor, a stroll along the embarcadero, and a walking tour of the Gas Lamp Quarter, and you will have spent an enjoyable week touring beautiful San Diego. For the more adventuresome, there are fishing excursions, hot air balloon rides, and even air-combat experiences.
Las Vegas, Nevada is a vibrant pulsating city and the largest adult playground in the world. It is a community that was created from the wastelands of the Mojave Desert in Nevada specifically to provide a gambling and entertainment oasis for the titillation seeking residents of post-war Los Angeles. Everything in Las Vegas has been done (or overdone) on a grand and spectacular scale. Along the Las Vegas strip, a black glass pyramid rises over a hundred meters above the desert with a larger than full sized replica of the Sphinx at its entry. Next to it, sits a larger than life castle with garishly colored turrets. Across the street, is a scaled-down skyline of New York City complete with a Brooklyn Bridge and a Statue of Liberty. Beyond that, you can see a half-sized replica of the Eifel Tower, a near full sized replica of the Piazza San Marco from Venice and a large volcano that erupts flames every thirty minutes. In Las Vegas, you often ask yourself, "Is this really a city, or am I visiting some futuristic amusement park on another
On any given evening in Las Vegas, you will find hundreds of entertainment events such as the renown Las Vegas stage shows, world class sporting events, performances by world famous entertainers plus music, dance and comedy at large and small venues throughout the city. This city never seems to sleep. The frivolity continues long into the night and the serious gamblers continue their pursuit of riches until well after the morning sun has risen on a new day
In 1931 gambling was legalized in the barren desert state of Nevada while it remained illegal in the more populous neighboring state of California. As early as 1940, the first hotel casino named El Rancho Vegas was constructed on the outskirts of a sleepy desert community in the Mojave Desert of southern Nevada known as Las Vegas. A second hotel casino named the Last Frontier was opened a year later. Both profited from their proximity to the large gambling population living in Los Angeles and other southern California communities. In December of 1946, Bugsy Siegal a reputed New Yorkgangster, then living in Beverly Hills California, and managing various illegal gambling operations on the West Coast, built a lavish new hotel casino named the Flamingo. He dreamed of creating a whole new resort city in the desert dedicated to gambling and entertainment. Unfortunately, Bugsy was shot to death in his Beverly Hills home in 1947; so he never got to see his dream fulfilled; but the legacy of lavish hotel casinos controlled by gangsters persisted in Las Vegas for many decades to come.
Today, this desert gambling oasis is a thriving city with more than one million inhabitants and over 38 million visitors a year. It is one of the fastest growing cities in the USA, with up to 5,000 new residents settling there every month. It has fourteen of the fifteen largest hotels in the USA and over 130,000 rooms available to visitors. Gambling and entertainment are still its biggest attractions and its largest industries. Supposedly, all the mafia gangsters have been removed from the Las Vegas gambling scene, only to be replaced by large corporate owners. (Is that an improvement?) In 1999, Oscar Goodman, the flamboyant lawyer whose spirited defense of many reputed gangsters and criminals earned him the unofficial title of "mouthpiece for the mob", was elected mayor of Las Vegas. He seems to be a most appropriate character to lead the government of "Sin City" USA.
All the action is centered on one broad avenue that stretches from the southern fringe of the city northward for a dozen miles until it reaches the heart of old downtown. This is Las Vegas Boulevard, commonly known as "the Strip". McCarran International Airport is located adjacent to the southern end of the Strip, and nearly all of the major casinos are lined up along its sides. A drive down Las Vegas Boulevard takes you past the pyramid of Luxor casino, the skyline of New York casino, the Eifel Tower of Paris casino, the great tent of the Circus casino and the lofty tower of the Stratosphere casino. Eventually, it takes you to downtown Vegas and Fremont Street, home of the historic old gambling parlors like Binyons and the Golden Nugget. Just driving down the strip past all these spectacular casino resorts is a fantastic experience. At night, "the strip" comes alive with miles of colored neon and millions of dancing, pulsating lights.
Since the early days when Las Vegas was but a sleepy town in the desert, Nevada has had a reputation as a very permissive state that allowed legal gambling, legal prostitution and easy divorce. Many California citizens would drive across the state line to Las Vegas in order to obtain quick-and-easy divorces from their unwanted spouses. Since divorces were often instigated by the desire to marry a new mate, Las Vegas began offering quick-and-easy weddings to go along with the quick-and-easy divorces. Wedding chapels sprouted along the Strip to accommodate this unique industry of legal mate swapping.
Today, many other states offer quick no-fault divorces, so the "Las Vegas divorce" is no longer in great demand. The city has, however, kept its reputation for quick-and-easy marriages. The wedding chapels are still visible along the strip and in the downtown area near the Clark County Court House. Nearly all the major casinos have wedding chapels or wedding rooms. The City marriage office is open until midnight every weekday and open 24 hours a day from Friday until Sunday. If you suddenly decide you want to get married at 4AM on a Sunday morning, you can easily do it in Las Vegas.
