Balboa Island ferry crossings, the peninsula at low tide, and Southern California living at its most unhurried
I've spent time in Newport Beach on several visits over the years — it's an easy drive from Los Angeles, an hour or so depending on traffic, and the change of pace from the city is immediate. Newport is quieter, more residential, less anxious. The harbour is genuinely beautiful. The light over the Pacific in the late afternoon is the kind of light that makes everything look approximately perfect.
The city is built around a large harbour — one of the largest recreational harbours in the United States — and the social geography follows the water. The Balboa Peninsula runs along the harbour's outer edge; Balboa Island sits in the harbour itself, accessible by ferry or by bridge. The ferry is a flat-bottomed barge that holds three cars and runs continuously across a 200-metre gap, and taking it feels like an anachronism in the best possible way.
The Balboa Peninsula is the kind of beach town that does everything it does well without making a fuss: surf shops, fish taco stands, the historic Balboa Pavilion (1906, listed on the National Register of Historic Places), the Fun Zone with its Ferris wheel, and the long stretch of beach on the ocean side. Newport Pier at the northern end of the peninsula is where the dory fleet still lands their catch every morning — small flat-bottomed dory boats that go out before dawn and return around eight, selling fish directly from the boats.
Crystal Cove State Park, north of Newport, has preserved the stretch of coastline that most of Orange County has developed. The historic district there — a collection of 1920s and 1930s beach cottages, some available to rent — sits above a beach of considerable quality. The hiking trails in the canyon above the park give you the native coastal sage scrub landscape that once covered all of this coast, and the view from the ridge takes in the whole sweep from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to San Clemente.
Newport Beach is for slowing down. It rewards walks and boat rides and long lunches and watching the harbour traffic from a restaurant deck. It is Southern California without the urgency — which is to say it is Southern California at its most enjoyable.
