There are no catchy phrases or cute nicknames for San Diego. No one has written a song or poem that has snuggled its way into our collective consciousness: it’s up to you, San Diego, San Diego? San Diego, that toddlin’ town? The other city by the bay? No; it simply has to be enough that once you’ve been here, you’ll never quite get it out of your system. The best weather in the country is here, as is world-class theater, great shopping, quirky museums, and an ocean where sea lions crawl onto the shore to sun themselves. There’s a terrific zoo, a fantastic wildlife park, wonderful restaurants serving, among other things, the city’s world-famous fish tacos, great snorkeling, great surfing, great fishing, great biking, and great hiking.

This is San Diego, a vacationer’s paradise, ideal for those who like variety and for those who can’t decide between the city and the beach. It is one of the few areas of the country where the weather is given for the mountains, desert, inland, and sea, since all are within a couple of hours of the city. The joke is that meteorologists are forced to report the weather outside of San Diego because the most boring job in the world is to report the weather in San Diego: "Today will be 70 and sunny." "Today will be 70 and sunny." "Today will be 70 and sunny."

It wasn’t too long ago that San Diego was a sleepy little town, peaceful but devoid of much culture, a place where movie stars came to get away from it all. In the past 10 to 15 years, however, the city has grown by leaps and bounds; it now has a population of 1.3 million (2.8 million county-wide) and is the seventh-largest city in the United States. Much of the growth has come from people tired of unpredictable weather and winter coats who want to live where they can go holiday shopping in shorts and T-shirts. Other growth has come from companies that relocate here partly because of the ease of recruiting workers. The area is also filled with Navy and Marine personnel from the bases here who retire from the military and don’t want to leave.

San Diego is where California began. In 1542, explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo was commissioned by the governor of Guatemala to take a voyage up the California coast under the flag of Spain. He reached "a very good enclosed port," which is what we now know as San Diego Bay; Cabrillo’s statue stands at the edge of Cabrillo Park on the spot where he is believed to have anchored his boat. In the mid-18th century, when it was feared that Russian interest in Alaska was a prelude to Southern expansion, Spanish missionaries came to California, and Father Junipera Serra built the first of his 31 famous California missions in San Diego. All around San Diego there are tributes to the city’s rich past.

And yet San Diego’s focus is very much on the present. It is a city in which the arts flourish. Balboa Park, the largest urban cultural park in the country, features 15 museums, numerous art galleries, free outdoor concerts, the Tony Award-winning Globe Theatres, and the San Diego Zoo. The upscale community of La Jolla, a few miles up the coast, is the site of the La Jolla Playhouse, another Tony Award-winning theater. This one was begun in 1947 by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer. Quirky museums, like the Museum of Making Music, flood the county. Art exhibits are plentiful. And the kids won’t know what to do first—swim in the ocean, visit SeaWorld, pan for gold in an old hard-rock gold mine, go to LEGOLAND, explore the tidepools, or visit the Aerospace Museum and Hall of Fame, where they can go on a motion simulator ride that takes them on different planes throughout time.

But really, it won’t matter, because whatever you don’t have a chance to do this time, you can do next time. Or the next. Or the one after that.