Stepping out of my normal routine a bit with some US travel! I was in San Diego for work and my brother drove down from LA to hang with me for the day. Since we didn’t have a ton of time, we tried to just stick to one area of the city. We decided on Balboa Park!

Balboa Park is a huge area of San Diego that is a great place to spend a day (or two!). It contains several museums, gardens and even the famous San Diego Zoo! I won’t be talking about the zoo today. Instead, I’m going to show you what else you can do inside the park!

Make sure to get to the park early enough if you plan on going to the museums. We had planned to go to the Science Museum but got there too late in the day to make it worth the money. We ended up checking out the Museum of Photographic Arts which was really great! This is not a large museum so it was easily digestible in about 1-2 hours. The Seeing is Believing? exhibit is open through October 29th and was one of my favorite parts. It starts with the origins of photography all the way through viewing 3D images with special goggles! There are a lot of things your brain does in combination with vision and it was so interesting to learn more about.

Keep strolling down the main avenue in the park to see all of the gorgeous Spanish style buildings!

Make sure to stop at the Botanical Building! This view below with the lily pond in the foreground is the most photographed scene in the park! You can’t tell from here but we had to wait for others to clear out before we could take our own shots. The Botanical Building was built in 1915 for an exposition and is one of the world’s largest lath structures. In case you’re like me and don’t know what lath is, it’s thin wood strips. So, this is open to the air because it is just wood slats and no glass. So cool!

You can see the lath structure better in the photo below.

There are tons of other gardens around the park which we didn’t make it to: a cactus garden, native plant garden, desert garden and rose garden. We did drive by them and I would recommend adding them to your itinerary if you have time! We did find this really cool tree (I think it’s a strangler fig) down a hill from the fountain above. Just make sure you don’t get caught up in it like my brother did 😉

Last but not least, find a place to stop and watch the sunset! Hopefully, it will be as beautiful as the one we saw!

That’s how we spent our quick trip to Balboa Park! I hope you enjoyed it. I would love to go back and explore more and see the places we missed. Have you ever been to the park? What’s your favorite part?