The 10 Best Rainy Day Activities in San Diego

On May 26, 1868, San Diego's Board of Trustees set aside a 1,400-acre tract of land as City Park, and the California Legislature made it official two years later. The park was later renamed for Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the Spanish explorer who was the first European to see the Pacific Ocean, a good name for a park in a city that plans most of its days around that ocean. Then came the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 and 1916. It gave the park the Cabrillo Bridge and the Spanish Colonial Revival buildings along El Prado, designed by architect Bertram Goodhue, and those buildings became the cultural core that holds today's museum row.

That history is why a Balboa Park museum crawl is the best rainy day plan in San Diego. The park now holds 15 museums, plus gardens and the San Diego Zoo, and draws roughly 14 million visitors a year. No other plan on this list lets you build your own route in one place. You choose two or three museums to suit whoever's with you, and if the first one runs long or the kids fall for the second, you just change course.

The trick is mixing collections. The Fleet Science Center and The Nat, the park's natural history museum, are easy starting points for kids and curious adults. The art museums are where you go when the group is ready for a quieter afternoon. One of each gives the day a nice rhythm, and the variety is exactly what people who love this plan keep coming back to.

Two things to plan around. Every institution sets its own hours, tickets and exhibitions, so check each stop before you lock in the route. And while every museum is indoors, the walks between buildings belong to the weather. Keep your picks close together on El Prado and the Palisades, bring a hood, and treat each walk as a quick dash to the next door.

The numbers are what stay with people. When the USS Midway was commissioned in 1945, named for the World War II Battle of Midway, it was the largest ship in the world. It ran 1,001 feet long and could hold a crew of about 4,500, and at sea that crew went through around 80,000 haircuts a year and 43,000 pounds of laundry a week. The carrier went on to serve for decades before starting a second life as a museum ship on the Downtown waterfront.

That scale is what makes the USS Midway Museum such a strong rainy day pick. Below decks, the living and working spaces add up to something like a small city, and veteran docents and an audio guide fill in the stories as you go. The praise centers on the aircraft, the below-decks access, those docents and how much depth the visit has. Forbes has named it San Diego's biggest tourist attraction, and it has the layers to back that up.

If the Balboa Park crawl wins on flexibility, the Midway wins on depth: one ship, one ticket and a lot of ship to cover. Order your visit around the weather. Start inside, below decks and through the Hangar Deck exhibits and interactive displays, then watch for a break in the rain before heading up to the flight deck, where the aircraft sit in the open air.

A little planning helps. It's a popular stop, so a wet day brings company. Some routes use steep ladders and tight passages, so anyone with mobility limits should look at the accessibility routes before buying. And if your group wants more than a self-guided visit, the Midway runs docent-led VIP tours and an overnight adventure program.

Once the museums close and nobody's ready to go home, head to J Street. Arcade Monsters San Diego is an arcade, bar and restaurant in East Village, spread across two floors of anime-themed cabinets, classic games, new arcade machines, rhythm games and pinball. The company describes the concept as "one of the most unique arcade and nightlife experiences in the country," and the San Diego location is one of seven, alongside Murrieta here in California and five spots in Florida.

If the Midway is the afternoon plan, Arcade Monsters is the night. Fans of the place point to three things: the range of games, the late hours and a layout that handles a group well. That last part matters on a rainy day, when you have six people, four opinions and zero beach plans. Everyone can scatter to their own machine, then regroup at the bar or over food.

Take one full lap of both floors before you commit to anything. The classics are easy to spot. Beyond them, look for the rhythm cabinets and the newer multiplayer machines, which suit a group that wants to play against each other instead of taking turns.

Two practical notes before you go. Arcade Monsters is cashless at every location, so bring a card. Pass pricing varies from one location to the next, so confirm the San Diego options at the door. Extras like rollerskating belong to some of the sibling locations, and the San Diego arcade keeps its focus on the games, the food and the bar.

Carlsbad's Museum of Making Music is a museum where playing with the exhibits is part of the plan. It traces how instruments, the people who make them and new technology shaped popular music, and it puts hands-on instrument stations right alongside the history. You read about how the music got made, and then you make some.

The museum was established in 1998 and opened to the public in March 2000. It runs as a program of the NAMM Foundation, the nonprofit arm of NAMM, the music products industry association known for its big trade shows. Its stated mission is to "celebrate the people and the products that bring music to our world," and the layout follows through: the galleries tell the story, and the playable instruments let you add a verse.

The praise centers on those instrument stations, the compact, manageable size and the free parking, which counts for a lot on a wet day. Walk the galleries in order first so the history builds, then give the instruments real time. About two focused hours covers the museum, which makes it an easy half-day for a family or a group of friends.

It ranks this high for how specific and hands-on the experience is, and it's the rare museum where the kids and the grandparents end up in the same band. For most of the county it's a drive up to Armada Drive in Carlsbad, so check the days it's open before you set out.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego's La Jolla home began as a house. Architect Irving Gill designed it in 1916 for philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps, and the museum was established there in 1941. Since then the building has grown again and again: expansions by Mosher & Drew in 1950, 1960 and the late 1970s, by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in 1996, and most recently by architect Annabelle Selldorf, whose work ran from 2017 to 2022.

Inside is a permanent collection of roughly 5,500 works focused on art made after World War II, with pieces by Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd and California installation artist Robert Irwin. Irwin's site-specific 1997 work "1° 2° 3° 4°" cuts squarish openings into three tinted museum windows to frame the view, so the building itself becomes part of the art.

MCASD sits on Prospect Street facing the ocean, and fans single out the ocean-facing galleries and the rotating contemporary exhibitions. Start with whatever show is up, since that shapes the visit, then take those ocean-facing rooms slowly. The later hours Thursday through Saturday make it a strong late-afternoon pick, and MCASD has offered free admission to everyone on the third Thursday of the month.

MCASD lands at No. 5 mostly because it keeps a shorter week than the places above it, so check which days it's open before you drive to La Jolla. Pair it with Birch Aquarium, No. 9 on this list, for an all-La Jolla rainy day.

Some rainy days call for another gallery. Others call for climbing a wall. Mesa Rim Mission Valley is for the second kind: a climbing gym on Camino Del Rio South with tall roped walls, a bouldering area, a fitness floor and yoga, all under one roof.

It's one of three Mesa Rim gyms in San Diego County, alongside Mira Mesa and North City, and the company also runs gyms in Reno and Austin. Climbers praise the route variety and the quality of the instruction. The fitness floor and yoga classes give anyone who'd prefer to keep both feet on the ground a way to stay with the group.

First-timers have a couple of steps before touching a wall: a waiver and a first-visit orientation. Book that first visit, finish the paperwork and do the orientation, which is where that well-reviewed instruction comes in. Then start on the bouldering wall.

It's the highest-ranked active pick on this list, and it earns that spot for the group that has seen enough museums for one weekend and wants to move. After a morning in Balboa Park or aboard the Midway, an afternoon on the wall is a good way to shake off the gray.

The New Children's Museum on West Island Avenue in Downtown is built for younger kids who need to do something with their hands, especially when the rain has them bouncing off the walls at home. The museum commissions contemporary artists to create large, immersive installations that kids can explore, then backs them up with art-making studios.

The story goes back to 1983, when it opened as The Children's Museum of San Diego in La Jolla. It moved downtown in 1993 as the Children's Museum/Museo de los Niños, then took its current name in 2008 to mark its new focus on those artist-made installations. The 50,000-square-foot building, designed by architect Rob Wellington Quigley, leaves its construction and structure deliberately exposed, and it was recognized as one of the first green museums in California. The museum has also received the IMLS National Medal.

What people love here: the hands-on installations, the building itself and how well the museum works for the youngest visitors. Let your kid pick one big installation first, then head to the art-making studios before the energy runs out. Check the weekly schedule before you go, and get there early on a rainy weekend, when the museum can reach capacity. Downtown garage parking adds to the cost of the day, so plan for it.

Verbatim Books on 30th Street exists because its founder noticed something missing. Justine opened the shop in 2015 after more than a decade working at Fifth Avenue Books in Hillcrest, and she chose North Park because, in her words, "there weren't any bookstores in North Park." It started in 1,500 square feet. In 2019 it took over the building next door and grew to 5,000 square feet, which made it San Diego's largest bookstore.

The bigger space holds the shop's best details. The event room has a sculpture Justine built from more than 1,000 damaged books, and a 90-foot bookshelf mural by Tijuana artist Armando Elizarrares was finished in December 2021. Verbatim also co-produces the North Park Book Fair and the San Diego Book Crawl.

Start on the local-author and local-interest shelves, the part of the store people praise most, then drift through the big secondhand collection and the antiquarian and gently-used specialty sections. It's free to walk in, which makes Verbatim the low-commitment pick on this list: an hour of browsing, one book, and then somewhere warm to read it.

Seating is limited and the aisles are tight, so plan to take your find elsewhere. North Park parking can take a few extra minutes on a wet evening.

Birch Aquarium at Scripps sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific in La Jolla, and it doubles as the public exploration center for Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. That connection runs through more than a century of research history, and the exhibits are built around the work of Scripps and UC San Diego scientists, including conservation breeding programs. More than 500,000 people visit each year, along with over 40,000 pre-K through 12th-grade students in its education programs.

For families, the seadragons and penguins are the headliners, and they're where to start when it's pouring. The tie to real ocean science and the family-friendly pace are what people praise most. Birch ranks No. 9 here for one reason: the tide-pool plaza and ocean overlook are outdoors, so part of the visit depends on the weather. Save them for a dry gap between showers.

A couple of tips for the trip to Expedition Way. Buying tickets online costs less than paying at the door, and the aquarium's parking lot has a time limit, so check the details when you book. On a steady-rain day, pair it with MCASD, also in La Jolla, for a full afternoon out of the wet.

UTC Ice Sports Center has been part of University City since 1979, when it opened as Ice Capades Chalet inside the newly built University Towne Centre mall, one of San Diego's first mall-based ice rinks. Two years later it hosted the ISI World Recreational Team Championships. The name changed a few times after that, from Ice Chalet at UTC in the 1980s and '90s to La Jolla Ice Town and Ice Town around 2000, before it became the rink it is today.

It's also where some NHL careers got going. Alumni of the rink's hockey programs include Zeev Buium of the Minnesota Wild, Thatcher Demko of the Vancouver Canucks and Chad Ruhwedel of the Pittsburgh Penguins. That's quite a résumé for a rink inside a shopping mall.

On a rainy day, the draw is public skating on a single full-size sheet of ice. Skate and helmet rental are included, so beginners can show up with nothing but warm socks, and lessons are available for anyone who'd like to spend less time holding the rail. Private lessons, hockey leagues and birthday-party sessions round out the schedule.

That schedule is the one thing to plan around, and it's why UTC Ice closes out the list. Public session times move around hockey and lessons, so check the live calendar before you drive to Westfield UTC, pick one session and turn up early. Parking is validated free for four hours, then $2 an hour up to a $15 daily max, which leaves plenty of time for a full session.