Back on the coast, if you want to get a sense of what wealthy Orange Countians do to enjoy themselves, spend some time along the clean white strands of Newport Beach. Located at the southern edge of Los Angeles’s suburban sprawl, Newport started life as an amusement park and beach resort at the southern end of the L.A. streetcar lines. In the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of Angelenos spent summer weekends at the Balboa Pavilion, at the southern tip of the slender Balboa peninsula, where a few remnants of the pre–video game amusements survive—a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, and those odd “Pokerino” games in which you win prizes by rolling rubber balls into a series of numbered holes.
Midway along the peninsula, near 23rd Street, Newport Pier is flanked by another holdout from the old days: the dory fleet, where almost every day small boats set off to catch rock cod and more exotic fish that, starting around noon, are sold straight from the boats at an outdoor market right on the sands.
A mile south of Balboa Pavilion, next to the breakwater at the very southern end of Balboa peninsula, The Wedge is one of the world’s most popular and challenging bodysurfing spots, with well-formed waves often twice as high as anywhere else on the coast.
