The 7 Best Things to Do in Solana Beach, Ranked

This is the beach with a park sitting on top of it. Lawn, playground, restrooms, and a graded ramp down to the sand, which is the difference between a beach day and an expedition when somebody in the group is three years old. The sunsets are what people come back for. Stay up on the grass with a blanket when the tide has taken the sand — the view does not depend on how much beach there is.

The room is the whole argument. Belly Up puts you close enough to the stage to watch a guitarist's hands, and the sound holds up at that distance, which is rarer than it ought to be. The bookings are the part that keeps surprising people — artists you would expect to find in a theater, playing a club on Cedros instead. The floor is standing room, so where you plant decides your night. Get there early, or take the loft and watch the whole room work.

South Cedros is a few blocks of independent design shops, galleries, home stores, and makers, which is a strange and good thing to find beside a train station. You browse it rather than shop it. On Sunday the certified farmers market sets up on the street and the whole corridor stops being somewhere you pass through on the way to a show. Come on a Sunday if you only get one shot at it.

Step off the train and this is how you get everywhere else. The path runs north to south, landscaped the whole way, and it strings the station, Cedros, the civic blocks, and La Colonia together with public art posted along it. That is the reason a day here works with no car at all. Walk it south first thing, before you have decided anything, and the town arranges itself around you.

A professional theater company works year-round out of a small house off Lomas Santa Fe, and the room does half the job. Nobody sits far from the stage. There is no bad seat in the place, and at that range you can watch an actor decide something before they say it. The productions are properly made and the acting holds up under that kind of proximity. Read what is on this season and pick the play that sounds like your night.

Come at low tide or do not bother coming. The reef here only shows itself when the water pulls back, and then you get a shelf of tide pools under the cliffs with almost nobody standing on it. Getting down means stairs from a residential street, which is exactly why it stays quiet. Stay for the sunset once the pools have had their hour — the cliffs take the light and there is nobody in front of it.