Help with College Tour planning - California Edition

Parents Forum
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We are starting to plan a college tour trip this coming March for D23, who is very interested in California. @lkg4answers has already been quite helpful with some initial advice (we are going to start in the San Francisco area and work our way south) but they also suggested opening this question to the larger board as there are tons of people with expertise who may be willing to help.

In the San Francisco area (very generous description), we are planning on visiting:

Santa Clara
St. Mary’s College of California
University of the Pacific

We would like to find a fairly central base to stay while we visit those schools, hopefully base location also very close to a BART stop so we can easily get into San Francisco proper for some shopping (D23 loves boutiques, any shopping area suggestions welcome) and some nice dinners. Hotel recs, and restaurant suggestions very appreciated.

We are then still trying to decide whether to fly south or just keep rental car and do the drive south (it seems like 6 one way, half dozen the other due the the time getting back to airport, returning rental car, getting through security and taking flight, and picking up new rental car versus the 6 hr drive - but again I am open to the voices of experts - please advise).

In the LA area, we are planning on visiting:

Loyola Marymount
Occidental
Whittier College

Again, we want to stay somewhere centrally located to make those visit fairly easy - right now I am thinking that might be Santa Monica (so that D23 gets her beach fix in), but again other suggestions welcome. It looked like Santa Monica would mean no more than 1 hr drive to any of those campuses, even in less than ideal traffic conditions. Again, expertise welcome.

Our final stop (and fly out location) is going to be San Diego. We are planning on visiting:

University of San Diego

Again, hotel and restaurant recommendations greatly appreciated. We do want to take as much advantage of being so close to the beach and getting a chance to explore the area…anything we should particularly plan for?

We are basically planning on one college tour per day leaving plenty of time to either explore a campus in greater detail or be able to take advantage of the extra time to sightsee/shop/explore the general areas. The only two schools we are thinking of trying to see same day are Loyola Marymount and Occidental (Oxy being lower on her list so it might just become a bit of a drive by versus an organized tour).

Any and all suggestions (except for the idea of adding more schools to the tour) are very welcome. Hotel recs, driving routes, areas to check out, areas to avoid, restaurants (from taco trucks to Michelin rated - we love them all!), hidden gems - we want all the info we can get to make this trip fruitful and fun. Thanks in advance!

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For San Diego, the Hilton Mission Bay might be fun. About 3 miles of walking path there along the bay, although not really any restaurants to walk to from there. If you want walkable restaurants, something downtown (maybe near the convention center?) would be better. USD is very close to the Hilton Mission Bay, but anything from downtown north to Del Mar is a pretty easy drive to USD.

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Honestly, you’re much better off staying in a beach location down the coast from Santa Monica. I suggest looking for somewhere near Huntington Beach. There will be low rise hotel chains there. Don’t underestimate the awful traffic in LA and Orange County.

I’m from that area and was there in September. It’s not the beach, but you will get a really great selection of hotels in the Anaheim area, which is in a perfect location for most of those colleges and is a quick drive to a lot of great beaches. You could spend a day at Disneyland too, which is always on my list of must do’s.

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Ooh! A question I can help with!

St Mary’s is in Moraga, up the hilly road 10 minutes from two different BART stations - Orinda and Lafayette. Lafayette has one hotel (Lafayette Park Hotel - a 10 minute walk to the BART station), Orinda and Moraga to my knowledge don’t have hotels. You could probably find an AirBNB, though. The three towns comprise one “Lamorinda” community that flow into each other. There are chain hotels in nearby Walnut Creek. Walnut Creek, Lafayette, and sort-of Orinda all have great foodie/boutique options. Berkeley and Oakland are also very BART-able. 4th Street in Berkeley is a great shopping and foodie area, but you would have to drive.

In perfect traffic, Stockton is about an hour east and Santa Clara is about an hour SW of Lamorinda. Both routes are highly impacted by commute times, though, so plan accordingly. Neither has great public transit options from Lamorinda, but it would probably be the most centralized location to settle into. Plus the BART access to SF is super easy.

ETA: BART from Lafayette to SF is about 40 minutes, no changing trains required.

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Counting on a 6 hour drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles is very VERY optimistic! We live about 180 miles south of San Jose, and DS drives to Orange County for school, and it can take 6 hours + for that drive - on a good traffic day. On the other hand, the drive would give a good view of parts of California that aren’t the known for bits. Please consider a larger time window for that drive.

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@TdoesCollege I have been plotting the drive taking I-5 and with waze and google, both tell me that the drive should be somewhere in the vicinity of 5 1/2 - 6 hrs. I know I-5 isn’t a very picturesque drive, but it does seem to reliably be the time I keep getting when plugging it into different drive apps. Are the apps incorrect or were you assuming a coastal drive down (which is not on our plan, or else I would be planning several more days so that we could enjoy Carmel and other stops en route).

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The drive is easy, the traffic-not so much, so be aware of commute times.

The Manchester Grand Hyatt Downtown will also give you more walkable access to local area port restaurants Downtown. (Use your Hyatt rewards card!) Embassy Suites also has nice rooms across the street from the Manchester Hyatt.

I attended USD many many moons ago. If you want to stay very locally, there are hotels in Mission Valley that are probably a five minute drive from USD, however freeway noise can affect your stay.

The Hilton Mission Bay would give you nice views and be accessible to USD and South Mission Beach/Pacific Beach by car, but would be also be close enough to UCSD if you wanted to visit that campus in La Jolla.

Check out the beautiful views at La Jolla Cove.
If you’re coming in March, our weather tends to vary; it does get chilly for us, so jackets are recommended for March weather. Beach water temps can be in the high 50s. The water is extremely cold and swimming does not tend to be a priority at that time of year. Remind your daughter that this is not a tropical area. Those thick sweatshirts, that are sold at those bookstores at the universities, will come in handy.

For the Bay Area, we stayed in the Mission district, when our daughter attended UCSF, and went through the Farmers Market for browsing. Uber was phenomenal in SF for everything. Note that parking in San Francisco is very, very expensive even in the hotel lots. (Her housing expenses were more than double our mortgage on a monthly basis!)

UOP is one of the schools our daughter considered. It’s FAR from the Bay Area and traffic is a bear. Prepare your daughter; it’s not a “pretty” tourist area.

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The apps are optimistic! DS over thanksgiving weekend (Friday morning!) left from Templeton, down the I-5, and it still took him almost 5 hours (left at 9:46 am arrived at 2:33 pm, did pit stop for gas along the way). [We heard stories from local students that their travel back here took twice as long on Saturday/Sunday.] And Templeton is quite a bit further south than you are talking about starting from. And for your trip, be sure to add time to get to I-5, depending on where you’re starting from. And all it takes is one accident (or more), on either side of the freeway, and the estimate is toast. Please, take this as encouragement to plan extra time for this bit - it is well worth the drive. It will be long(er), however.

When we travel that direction, while we do stick to the coast, the drive is all we plan to do that day.

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Super helpful thanks! Will definitely plan the whole day to drive.

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Bay Area resident here. Your three “San Francisco area” colleges are all a significant distance from San Francisco itself. I agree with @ CateCAParent that staying in Lamorinda is a good option, although the commute from there to Santa Clara holds the possibility of being an absolute nightmare of traffic both directions. Alternatively, you could find a lovely hotel near the 19th Street BART station in Oakland. This area is lively, hip, and is packed with great restaurants. It’s an easy drive from Oakland to Moraga (and you would be going against traffic both ways). Oakland is slightly closer to Santa Clara than the Lamorinda area, and about the same distance to Stockton.

I think the only possible day to spend time in San Francisco would be the St. Mary’s tour day. You could tour St. Mary’s in the morning and then take the BART into the city in the afternoon. Driving down to Santa Clara and then driving into San Francisco and then back across the Bay Bridge sounds dismal - so many opportunities to get caught in traffic.

I am sure you have a very good reason for excluding it, but the University of San Francisco matches the other schools on your list so much better than the University of the Pacific. I spent a lot of time in the Manteca, Lodi, Stockton, Tracy area because of youth travel teams and it was never much fun. And the drive is not attractive either. But I happily acknowledge a Bay Area bias and I’m sure the University of the Pacific has its own charms.

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Also, LAX is under major construction right now and getting out of the airport can take a very long time. By the time you add up the airport gates and security and car rentals and flight, I think it’s possibly faster to drive.

If you stay in Santa Monica, while you’re not super close to either campus, it is a nice area and the pier is there, and lots of nice hotels and restaurants. If you are really splurging on a place to stay, there is Shutters or Casa del Mar. There is a Loews and a Marriott right on the beach there that are probably 1/3 the cost of the fancier ones but still really nice. Anything north of Ocean Park. Then you are also within easy drives also of more teen-friendly shopping like Melrose, or Fairfax Ave., and big instagram spots like the pink Paul Smith building.

Food probably deserves its own thread, but not far from Santa Monica is the Westfield Century City mall with Eataly, lots of restaurants, very beautiful shopping. (The 3rd street promenade is right there but you’ll see many of the same kinds of stores you could see at a mall anywhere else). You could also visit the grove and the adjacent farmer’s market shops.

I see you asked not to add schools to the list, but if Oxy is low on the list, it’s a pretty traffic-y trip to get from the west side to Eagle Rock, so you could swap that out and see UCLA for contrast which would be much closer, even if you just walked around the campus and Westwood area vs making that drive. If you do keep Oxy, there are some cute coffee shop type places in Eagle Rock, and you’d be closer to places like the Griffith Observatory, or the other direction to old town Pasadena.

Feel free to DM if you want more specific restaurant suggestions depending on where you’ll be in the area!

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Marina del Rey is a great place to stay while looking at LMU. 5-10 min to campus and lots of dining options nearby. Shopping on Abbot Kinney in Venice is a nice close escape, too.

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We live in LA (near Oxy!) and visit the Bay Area occasionally. We usually opt to drive, because it’s not that much longer than flying and it gives more flexibility. That said, I agree that it’s a pretty boring drive unless you take the coast route. You could also look into flying into Burbank intead of LAX – a much smaller, friendlier airport without the traffic hassles and construction of LAX.

Eagle Rock (near Oxy) is fun, as is Old Pasadena (only a few minutes from Oxy). If you like botanical gardens, both the Arboretum and the Huntington are within striking distance.

A lot of people love Oxy after they tour, so if there is interest, I’d consider keeping it on your list even if it’s not super convenient.

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We have relatives in San Diego…so we stayed with them when we made our CA college visits. But here was our itinerary. I will start by saying…we thought it was too far to drive to the Bay Area from any of the other locations.

Flew into San Diego. Visited University of San Diego first.

Next morning early, we drove to the LA area which isn’t that awful a drive. Visited Chapman in the morning, then drove to Claremont McKenna for the afternoon. We stayed in some hotel someplace sort of on the northern side of LA. Drove to Pepperdine for a visit the next day.

Then we drove back to San Diego. DH and DD flew to San Jose the next day where they then visited Santa Clara. They also drove around the area as DH had lived there a while ago. They walked around Stanford just because it’s so beautiful. This trip to the Santa Clara area was a day trip…shuttle in the morning, returned to San Diego that afternoon. No rental car is needed if you are only flying into San Jose and visiting SCU…the airport is a ten minute free bus ride away from the college.

We took a ten day trip…so we had days in between college visits, and were able to do some sightseeing.

So I would suggest you divide your trip into three sections…San Diego, LA, Bay Area. We thought the drive from San Diego to the LA colleges was very doable. We didn’t think the drive from anywhere in the LA area to Santa Clara was something we wanted to do….thus the airline shuttle.

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I would consider staying in San Jose which is really close to SCU and not a bad drive to Moraga or Stockton (since it would be against the commute). Caltrain is a decent option for SF, note that rental cars are frequently targeted for break ins there so that’s another reason to avoid driving. In San Jose, Santana Row is nice for shopping and Hotel Valencia there is cute.

We drive S to college in LA from the Bay Area often, the north side (UCLA) is easy and only 5-6 hours via I-5, anything that involves going across the city is painful. So staying in Santa Monica or thereabouts wouldn’t be a bad drive.

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As has been suggested, the price points vary wildly in LA and where you might want to stay really depends on what you want to do. A few notes on possible places to stay.

  • In Santa Monica, Shutters and Casa Del Mar are great, but they start at 500-600 per night. Lowes is nice too, probably 400s. Less fancy more quirky but still nice, we’ve had friends stay with older kids at the Shore Hotel (about $200) on Ocean Ave (overlooking the ocean) and they were quite happy. Lots of variety in good food choices nearby.
  • The advantages of Santa Monica are that it is close (approx. 20 mins) from Loyola Marymount, lots of restaurants and shopping, and of course the ocean. The disadvantage is that SM can feel both grungy and extremely touristy. If your family isn’t in to that, there are places slightly inland that are nice yet still close. Century City has nice upscale hotels, a fancy mall, and is very centrally located, but not really a neighborhood. Beverly Hills has some great hotels if you want upscale, but it also has some BH adjacent hotels that are nice.
  • Not exactly a destination you hear much about, but we’ve had people very happy with stays in downtown Culver City. There are a few nice hotels, including the new Shay (Hyatt connected), the Culver Hotel, and the quirky Palihouse Culver City. The neighborhood is young and fun, with lots of good dining options. It’s a nice area with lots going on, but not yet overrun by tourists, but that might be changing. It’s still fairly close to Loyola Marymount but more centrally located, and closer to some of the more popular shopping areas mentioned above. Plus it is on the Metro.
  • Upthread someone mentioned Huntington Beach. HB is a nice place but be warned, it is very far out of the way. With traffic be prepared to spend an extra hour each way to get to about anything you’ve mentioned. Plus it is very much a different feel than areas around Loyola Marymount or Oxy, so you won’t be learning much that will be helpful to her.
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Another plug for Oxy. We toured last summer on a friend’s recommendation and it quickly shot up to the top of my son’s list of fourteen schools.

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Thank you to everyone who had commented thus far (I am reading your suggestions and then jumping into further research based on your advice). Please keep the suggestions coming.

I am 100% sure we are going to start in SF area (flying into San Jose) and renting a car there. We are not planning on driving into SF proper, that is why the BART station was on our list. That’s also why we chose to fly into San Jose, rather than SFO. Seemed like the better choice with a rental car.

We are flying into San Jose early afternoon; we were planning to hit Santa Clara arrival day as D23 has a friend there so even thought it wasn’t high on D23’s list we were willing to add with the private student tour that didn’t depend on an official tour time. We would then head to whatever hotel we choose (TBD).

I really liked the idea of the Loraminda area idea and Walnut Creek might work with the hotel choices there and the BART station (love the not needing to change trains). It looks like there are nature hikes in easy proximity for after morning tours, if we decide not to jump on the BART. Thank you for that suggestion. :slight_smile:

I looked into the Oakland idea but couldn’t find a hotel that sounded all that appealing, reviews were all over the place. If anyone has specific hotels they would recommend in Oakland, please let me know or I will let that idea go (even though the really quick BART ride into SF sounded wonderful).

Right now, we are leaning towards driving down between north and south, but that hasn’t been cemented. Nice to know that the drive isn’t as bad if we are planning on staying in the Santa Monica area…though we aren’t really into the tacky tourist stuff (we like kitsch on occasion, but are not exactly “touristy” people - we won’t be checking out the Hollywood sign). When we are talking grunge, are we talking this is a city there is some grunge? Or are we talking about something else? I went to college on the south side of Chicago in the early 90s and have lived in both NYC and Chicago as an adult so I am pretty comfortable with city grunge but I am not sure I understand exactly what I should expect with this idea of ‘grunge’.

D23 has been pushing to check out UCLA (it was her first dream school when she was little), maybe we will just self-tour the campus - it is definitely not going on the list of applications. But it might just be nice to check out “the dream” in real life. Thanks for that idea! If we decide not to see Oxy, we will put UCLA into the sightseeing mix. Though the positive comments regarding Oxy make me leans towards keeping it on the list (this might totally depend on traffic issues while we are there).

We will be flying out of San Diego, so I am happy to hear that we will not be experiencing the construction of LAX (thank you for that heads up). Checking out the hotels recommended in San Diego, will definitely be back with more questions.

Thanks again for all the feedback thus far, please keep it coming!

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The 6 hours from San Jose to LA/Santa Monica is pretty easy. If you’re chalking that day up to travel and not doing a tour that day, you might consider driving down the coast instead and maybe staying overnight in Santa Barbara. Hotel prices can be pretty reasonable there near the marina. Then the next day you could head into LA via Malibu, cutting over to the coast in Oxnard. 2 days of beautiful drives. SB to Malibu is only a few hours, so you’d have time to do something else that day.

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In Santa Monica we’ve stayed at Channel Road Inn which is a lovely B&B on the north end just up from the beach (they have bikes you can borrow to ride along the beach path). That didn’t feel as touristy as the hotels further south. All the Four Sisters Inns are great.

S prefers Pacific Palisades to Santa Monica but that’s further from LMU.