← Misc · 2022–2026

San Diego, Again

A library, a beach full of seals, a panda, a LEGO city, a balloon, a conference and a kissing sailor, and counting.

Some places you visit once and tick off. San Diego is the one we keep going back to, and the reasons are not complicated. First, it's not a far drive. It is close enough to decide on in the morning and be back from at night, which is exactly the kind of distance that turns a city into a habit. Second, there is always something to see. There's the UC San Diego campus on its mesa, the zoos (there are two, and they are very different), the cliffs and coves of La Jolla, and the old adobe streets of Old Town, where the city began.

Third, and maybe most of all, San Diego sits right up against the border, and you can feel it. The Mexican culture there is not a theme or a restaurant category. It's in the street names, the food, the music, the language you hear around you, and in the fact that another country is a twenty-minute drive away. Few American cities wear their neighbor so openly, and I like it for that.

What follows is not one trip but several, told in order from the camera roll. Most were day trips, a few with a night in town. Some came with family or friends, one was a conference, and one was mostly for the dog. For a while it was also a holiday calendar: Halloween at the zoo, Christmas at LEGOLAND, Easter at the Safari Park. The map shows where they all landed.

October 2022: just passing through

The first time we drove this way, San Diego was only the road to somewhere else: we went straight through it to the border for a Day of the Dead weekend in Tijuana, which has its own story.

A library on stilts · February 26, 2023

The first real visit was just the two of us, on a Sunday afternoon at UC San Diego. The campus sits on a mesa above La Jolla, cut by eucalyptus canyons, and in the middle of it stands the building everybody photographs: Geisel Library, designed by William Pereira and opened in 1970, a stack of concrete and glass floors that get wider as they go up, resting on great angled legs. It is named after Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, and it looks a little like something he might have drawn.

A few minutes' walk away there is a stranger sight: a small blue-grey house with a garden, perched at a tilt on the corner of an engineering building seven floors up. It is Fallen Star, by the artist Do Ho Suh, part of the campus's Stuart Collection of outdoor art. From the ground it looks as if it landed there by accident.

From campus we drove down to La Jolla Cove for the sunset. At 5:38 the white cliffs above the cove were crowded with seabirds, and below them sea lions lay piled on the rocks just above the surf. The sun went into the ocean at 5:42.

Around the corner, at 5:58, the beach at the Children's Pool was already covered in harbor seals. We ended the day in Old Town, under strings of paper flags.

The seals of La Jolla · February 3–4, 2024

A year later we came back with my parents. In the late afternoon we stood on the seawall at La Jolla's Children's Pool. The wall was built in 1931 to make a calm, sheltered beach for children to swim at. The harbor seals had other ideas. They moved in decades ago, and now the little beach belongs to them: dozens of grey and spotted bodies lying in rows on the sand, with gulls walking between them and the surf breaking just beyond the wall.

We stayed the night at the Homewood Suites by the airport, near Liberty Station, the old naval training center by the bay that is now parks, shops and restaurants. The next morning was clear, and across the water and the green lawns the downtown towers stood in a pale row on the horizon.

Halloween at the zoo · October 31, 2024

That autumn it was the zoo's turn. We drove down the evening before Halloween and reached the city just as the sky over the downtown towers turned pink.

We spent the night at the Hilton in Mission Valley, and the zoo was the next day. The San Diego Zoo sits in Balboa Park, a short hop from downtown, and has been there since 1916. It is one of the most famous zoos in the world, partly for its animals and partly for its setting: a hilly park of canyons and mesas planted so thickly that many of the paths feel like a botanical garden. The first thing you meet, a little after noon on a cloudless day, is a huge bronze lion in mid-leap over the entrance plaza.

The star of that autumn, though, was black and white. In the summer of 2024 the zoo welcomed two giant pandas from China, Yun Chuan and Xin Bao, the first giant pandas to arrive in the United States in more than twenty years, and they were a big part of why we went that day. A little after three o'clock we found one of them: Xin Bao, if I'm right. She was doing what pandas do best: sitting in tall grass with its back against a dirt bank, half buried in bamboo, and completely uninterested in the crowd. These pictures are about as good as it got. A rounded white back, a dark shoulder, and one black ear behind the leaves.

We had brought our own panda, too: a toy red panda that has travelled with us before and spent part of the afternoon being held up against the zoo's greenery, as if visiting relatives. Toys seem to like this zoo. Or rather, this zoo seems to like toys: the little hedgehog who was the mascot of our 2024 road trip came with us that Halloween too, and this was the day we lost him for good. Somewhere in Balboa Park, a hedgehog is still on holiday.

From the zoo we went on to Old Town, where the city began. It was Halloween, and the old plaza had gone all in on the Day of the Dead: skeleton mariachis with guitars, skeletons in ball gowns, and ofrendas heaped with marigolds and roses under strings of papel picado.

Around the corner, a small wooden house carried a sign reading "The Land of the Golden Mountain", with 金山, Gold Mountain, in red between its windows.

Christmas in bricks · December 25, 2024

Eight weeks later we were back in the county, this time on Christmas Day and about thirty-five miles up the coast in Carlsbad. LEGOLAND California opened in 1999 as the first LEGOLAND outside Europe. It's a park built mainly for young children, but it has one corner that is really for everyone. At two in the afternoon on a grey, streaky-skied Christmas, the big yellow sun over the gate was the brightest thing around. Just inside stood a Christmas tree built entirely of LEGO, ornaments, candles, star and all.

The holiday mood carried on in the details. One display case held a snowy winter village in miniature: chalets with frosted roofs, a little Christmas tree and a red steam train running along the front. It's the kind of scene people build at home on a dining table every December, except here somebody had the time and, presumably, a great many more bricks. It sat in a cabinet painted in candy-cane stripes, which seemed fair.

The real reason grown-ups come is Miniland USA: whole American cities rebuilt from millions of bricks at about one-twentieth scale, with water, boats and moving traffic. Washington, D.C. was the first city we reached. The Washington Monument, the Capitol dome and the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are all there. In front of them, a red double-decker tour bus crosses a stone bridge over a reflecting pool that, on this cloudy day, reflected the real sky better than any model could.

And then, a few steps on, San Diego itself, which made the day feel like a visit within a visit. The Miniland version of downtown has the Convention Center with its row of white sail-like peaks along the bay, the skyscrapers of the waterfront behind it, and, in its own oval of train track, Petco Park, home of the Padres. "SAN DIEGO" is printed on the outfield wall and the seats are packed with tiny fans.

The best part of Miniland San Diego is the bay. Along the water there's a whole county fair in bricks: a Ferris wheel signed "San Diego Fair", stands for fried food on a stick, slushies and a chili cook-off, and hundreds of minifigures milling between them. Look past the wheel and the rest of the region is crammed onto the far shore. The stepped concrete tower on the hill is UC San Diego's Geisel Library, the famous building named after Dr. Seuss. To the right, the red roofs look like the Hotel del Coronado. We had stood under the real Geisel the winter before; this one comes up to about your knee.

Miniland goes on to New York, where the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center rise over a tight grid of brick avenues and Grand Central sits at the corner. Then, a little out of place in "Miniland USA" but nobody minds, comes London. Big Ben and the London Eye stand on a small island in a pond, framed by willows, with a giant stack of LEGO bricks and a brick elephant on the far bank. By half past three the light was turning gold.

We stayed until the park lights came on. At five to five, on the way out, the LEGO tree had its candles and star lit, and the yellow sun over the gate was lit up against a deep blue dusk, the shops beneath it glowing. Within a few minutes the sky over the parking lot turned pink and orange behind the palms, which is about as Californian as a Christmas evening gets. It was a good way to spend a holiday: walking around the whole country, slightly scaled down, and ending up back in San Diego.

The seals after dark · April 12, 2025

In April we came back with two friends. We spent the afternoon at UC San Diego, walked through Balboa Park at the end of the day, past the Botanical Building and its long lily pond under a grey sky, and ended the evening, after dark, on the same seawall at the Children's Pool. Spring is pupping season, when the beach is closed to people from December to May, and the seals had it to themselves. Under the floodlights they lay scattered across the pale sand.

Easter in a balloon · April 20, 2025

A week later we were back again, for the zoo's sister. The San Diego Zoo Safari Park opened in 1972 (it was called the Wild Animal Park until 2010) on some 1,800 acres of the San Pasqual Valley near Escondido, half an hour inland. Where the zoo is a dense garden, the Safari Park is open country, laid out so herds of African and Asian animals share big, rolling enclosures. We went on Easter Sunday, a bright spring afternoon. The first animal in the photos is a hornbill, perched high in a walk-through aviary with its orange casque against the netting.

The real plan was the Balloon Safari. It's a tethered helium balloon, yellow with red rays like a cartoon sun, that lifts a round open gondola straight up on a cable over the park and then winches it back down. From the launch pad it looks enormous. The balloon's skirt is printed with the zoo's Wildlife Alliance logo and the gondola is painted with animals. Underneath, it's all sky and steel cable.

Standing in the gondola, you look straight up into the middle of it. The red and yellow stripes radiate out from a dark valve at the center, with the maker's name, Aérophile, printed around it and steel cables running down to the rim. It looked less like a balloon than a giant beach umbrella, and we were the handle. Then the winch let out the cable and the ground quietly fell away. There is no burner, since it's helium, so the ride up is a quiet one.

The best view was straight down through the netting. The whole park spread out below: winding paths, the pale roofs of the buildings, a turquoise pool, the green slopes of the enclosures. Right in the middle sat the perfectly round, dark shadow of our own balloon, with a tiny dot hanging under it that was us. It is the photo from that day I like most, a picture of ourselves without anyone in it.

Looking out instead of down, the enclosures that seem huge from the ground resolve into a landscape. Green hills are crossed by pale dirt tracks, clusters of palms stand around watering holes, and the dry chaparral hills of inland San Diego roll on behind. From the air the African plains look surprisingly like the real thing, or at least like the documentaries. The giraffes standing in the grass were only specks, but at least they were there.

Later in the afternoon we went into those same plains at ground level, on a safari truck. That's the other way to see this park, and the opposite of the balloon in every sense. Antelope grazed on the hillside right beside the track and barely looked up. Further on, giraffes and a rhino stood around a tall rock tower under the palms, and we watched them from the truck as it rolled past. Two hours earlier we had seen this ground from the balloon; now it was at eye level.

Some of them came close. Two giraffes walked past together on the bare ground below a green slope, and a white rhino stood in the sun by the enclosure wall.

NeurIPS · December 2025

In December 2025 San Diego hosted NeurIPS, the biggest conference in machine learning, at the Convention Center, the building with the white sails along the bay that we had last seen in LEGO at Miniland. I didn't have a paper there. I went to listen, to learn what people in other corners of the field were working on, and to meet them. The photos from inside are mostly of badges and crowded rooms, so the one here is from the drive in: downtown coming into view over the palms on I-5.

A sailor, a carrier and a dog · October 2026

The latest visits brought Wangcai. On a cloudless Wednesday afternoon in October we walked her along the Embarcadero, the promenade on the edge of the bay downtown. The first thing you meet there is Embracing Peace, Seward Johnson's 25-foot statue of a sailor kissing a nurse, based on the famous photograph from the day the Second World War ended. Behind it is the ship that makes it make sense: the aircraft carrier USS Midway, in service from 1945 to 1992 and a museum since 2004, with its planes and helicopters parked on the flight deck high above the water.

A little after four we had fish tacos from Carnitas' Snack Shack, eaten outside in the sun, with Wangcai sitting directly in front of the tray and not looking anywhere else. She did not get the taco. Later, as the sun got low, she climbed out onto the rocks at the water's edge and stood looking over the bay, which was all glitter.

Four days later we were back with Wangcai, this time with three friends. At sunset we were on the beach at Carlsbad for a beach yoga session, set out on the sand with candles, a fire pit and little jack-o'-lantern pumpkins. Then we drove down to the Embarcadero for an evening by the water, under the Midway's lights.

Next time

Eight visits in, the list at the top of this page is nearly covered: the campus, the seals, both zoos, Old Town on the Day of the Dead and Balboa Park's Botanical Building. What the photos still haven't found is Coronado, across the bay. It will get its section here too. That's the nice thing about a city that's not a far drive. There's always a next time, and it is never very far off.

Map built from the photos' timestamps and locations. Photo locations have been removed from the published images. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors; each stop is placed where its photo was taken, and hotels and home are never marked.

Some photos in this post are my wife's.