SD Balboa Park

As soon as we arrived we headed to the Visitor’s Center to pick up my ticket package, which ran something like $85 for the week and covered admission everywhere, including the zoo.  The kids were both free everywhere, all week, thanks to a promotional month (October) that they run every year.  And that, by the way, is the 90% of the reason we made this trip—no way were we going to miss out on this much culture for those kind of discounts!

This first set of photos is just the exteriors and grounds—things we saw as we strolled between the car, the Visitor’s Center and our first real stop, the Natural History Museum.
                 
Parking was surprisingly easy (and free again), although I expect it’s much worse in the summer.  As we left the parking lot and came around the corner, the first thing we saw was the side of the organ pavilion.  Just past that is the Japanese Friendship Garden.  We haven’t even made it onto the main avenue of the park and already I’m pleased and impressed.

If you had to pick just one landmark from Balboa Park as the most recognizable, it would be this bell tower which is part of the building housing the Museum of Man.  The bell tower, along with several other prominent buildings, was constructed for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition to commemorate the completion of the Panama Canal.

                     
After that quick stop at the Visitor’s Center, we turn to walk down the central (pedestrian) avenue, El Prado, and see, on our left, the Botanical Building and, on our right, well, that’s just a covered walkway.  The vast majority of the architecture in the park is in that ornate Spanish Colonial Revival style, with the exception of a few distinctive buildings such as the Botanical Building there and the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. 

Passing several other museums along the way, we reach the Natural History Museum and head inside—I’ll show you that next time.

                      
Eventually, we finish up with the dinosaurs and their buddies and we come on out to grab a snack.

                    
Happily, there’s this nice fountain directly in front of the Natural History Museum—that’s the Science Museum right across the way—where we can sit for a moment.  Circling the fountain, you can see the bell tower in the distance.

The kids enjoy the echoes of the colonnade, and since there’s no one else around at the moment I let them give me an impromptu concert.

                            
Frankly, at this point I couldn’t tell you precisely which buildings these are, other than to say that we saw them as we were headed back the way we’d already come.  But you should be getting a pretty good idea of the overall flavor of the park at this point.  Not a bad place to walk around for a while, definitely.

Almost back to the car, we’re passing the organ pavilion again when someone starts playing Phantom of the Opera!  Free concerts are given every Sunday but, unfortunately, we weren’t there on a Sunday so we never did get to see the organ itself, but getting to hear the organist’s practice session was pretty fabulous.  Naomi jumped right up on stage and started dancing to the music—she probably danced up there for 20-30 minutes while the organ played bits and pieces of well-known tunes.