Note: I’ve blogged extensively about the bad travel experience at the end of our trip, but this post will be about our experiences before we left for LAX.

We spent the first bit of Friday morning trying to decide whether to go on a whale-watching cruise. I’m prone to motion sickness, so even though I’ve never before been sick on a boat, I’ve also never been on a boat on the ocean. Late March is also late in the whale season in San Diego, so we didn’t know if we’d see whales. Since the shortest whale-watching cruise was 3 1/2 hours, we decided to skip it.

One of the things I still wanted to do was spend a little time at the Maritime Museum at the Embarcadero. We paid our admission and were able to crawl around on the India Star, a Russian Submarine, and the ship that was used to portray the HMS Surprise in the movie Master and Commander. It was cool and we got some nice photos.

From there, we decided we wanted to spend our last afternoon in California at the beach. There were a few to choose from, but it was a difficult choice. La Jolla was already crowded on Thursday. We barely found a parking spot. We figured it would be even busier on a Friday. Mission Beach was nice, but we were hoping for more dramatic views – Mission Beach is just a wide, long expanse of flat sand. Jaime suggested Black’s Beach based on what she read in a guide book.

There are a few things worth mentioning about Black’s Beach. First of all, it isn’t that easy to get to. For the less-adventurous, the only way to get there is either a three-mile walk from the beach at Torrey Pines or a three-mile walk from the beach at La Jolla. And I don’t actually know for sure if there’s enough beach to allow you to do either of those walks. Maybe at low tide, but I don’t think there would be at high tide. The other solution for getting there is to park at the glider port in La Jolla, which is what we did. From there, it’s a rigorous hike down a 300-foot cliff. There’s a trail, but it’s rugged. Another solution, one favored by the surfers we saw, was to just pick a spot on the cliff and run down it. Those guys were insane, as one wrong step and it’s a long, hard drop to the bottom of the cliff.

Once you’re on the beach, there are a lot of things to like. We were there when the tide was relatively low, so the beach was very wide (more on that in a minute). The beach is two-miles long, and it wasn’t anywhere near crowded. The cliffs make for very dramatic, beautiful scenery. And since the glider port is above the beach, you can watch hang gliders and parasailers soaring overhead.

That said, Black’s Beach isn’t going to be a place everyone will want to visit. Some of the beach is technically part of Torrey Pines State Park, but some of it isn’t, and the part that isn’t is unofficially sanctioned as clothing optional. There’s some debate as to whether this is technically supposed to be allowed, but we saw a couple lifeguards drive by and they didn’t do anything to encourage anyone to change their level of dress or undress.

Now, we were at Black’s Beach in March, which is still considered to be winter, but in our experience, there were far more people on the beach who were dressed than undressed. We saw a lot of couples, a lot of surfers, and even a few families with children. As to the naked people, it’s probably worth mentioning that we saw no women. I don’t know if that’s also the case in July when it’s warmer out and I assume there are more locals on the beach. It’s also worth noting that most (not all, but most) of the naked guys stayed pretty far back from the surf. Again, it’s a wide beach. We were walking near the surf, and most of the naked people were sitting back closer to the cliffs. In most cases, you couldn’t see much even if you wanted to. But there were exceptions. Several guys seemed happy to parade up and down the beach wearing nothing but socks and shoes and a hat.

Obviously, if you’re going to be offended and aghast at the possibility of nudity, Black’s Beach isn’t the place for you. To me, the beach was nice enough and empty enough to make it worth putting up with the occasional naked guy walking by. I’d rather deal with that then wasting an hour driving around La Jolla trying to find a parking spot.

So that’s about all there is to say about Black’s Beach, other than that the hike is even more grueling going back up. Two days later and our legs are still sore. Up next, the big finish to our vacation.