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JOURNAL
LOCAL INTELLIGENCE
Newport's Balboa Peninsula is a long, narrow sandbar with ocean on one side and harbor on the other, and nearly everything worth doing sits on one of those two edges. The Fun Zone, with its Ferris wheel and arcade, faces the harbor near the ferry landing. The Wedge sits at the far tip, where a jetty bends incoming swell back on itself and produces a shorebreak heavy enough to draw bodysurfers from across the state.
The Wedge is a spectator sport for most people, and it should be. It breaks in shallow water directly onto sand, and on a big south swell the crowd watching from the beach is larger than the crowd in the water. That tells you what you need to know. Swim at one of the lifeguarded stretches farther up the peninsula and walk down to the tip to look.
Balboa Island sits across the harbor, and the auto ferry between them carries three cars at a time. You can also walk or ride on. The crossing is short and it is the best few minutes of the day.
Balboa Island is a loop of small cottages on tight lots with a seawall path running the whole way around. The walk is flat, the water is right there, and Marine Avenue through the middle handles the eating: frozen bananas, ice cream, a few restaurants and shops in a couple of blocks. It is a good hour or two rather than a full day, and late afternoon suits it.
Parking on the island is the problem. The streets are narrow, the spaces are short, and residents are using them. Coming from the peninsula, leave the car and take the ferry across on foot. Driving in over the bridge from Pacific Coast Highway, expect to circle, and expect the circling to take longer than the walk you were trying to avoid.
Summer weekends compress all of this. The ferry queues, the Fun Zone fills, and Balboa Boulevard slows to a crawl from mid-peninsula down to the tip. Mornings are calmer everywhere, and the harbor side is almost always calmer than the ocean side. Ask your local manager whether bikes come with the house. The peninsula is flat and long, and a bike solves the parking problem outright.