Thursday 20th - Balboa Island

It was another beautiful afternoon, with hardly a cloud in the sky and bright warm sunshine...... welcome to Balboa, Southern California.

On the way to Balboa Island, we stopped at the old Stuft Shirt restaurant, an iconic building from the 50's/60's that had been vacant for years, but is now a clothing/furniture store.

The staff were very friendly and even made Domenic a cup of coffee!

Domenic outside the old Stuft Shirt restaurant

Balboa Island is where Surf Music really began, with Dick Dale.
Balboa is an island, with entry and exit either over a bridge or by a short ferry ride. We entered by way of the bridge. This is a holiday town with the beachfront properties being mainly holiday lets.

Minty liked the look of the Budweiser Delivery

We wandered around the main street and The Beeb bought a new shirt from JP Maxwell - a surfy style shirt that was in the sale. However, once you added all of the taxes on, it was not such a great deal!!


By now the sun was starting to dip and we saw a wonderful sunset, from the beachfront, looking over to the Harbourside and The Pavillion where Dick Dale played

Full Moon and the Stars & Stripes

The Harbourside Pavillion where Dick Dale played

Sunset in Balboa

This is a holiday town with the beachfront properties being mainly holiday lets where every house seems to have won some kind of holiday let competition. They love Christmas here, with the town pulling probably the same power it takes to light up the whole of the UK, to keep their Christmas lights going.

Just some of the extravagant displays..........

The Gift Shop also doubled as a museum and you could tell straight away, this is a Republican stronghold. Quite a few movie stars lived down here, most notably John Wayne, Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan. One customer was absolutely delighted to have acquired the last John Wayne jigsaw puzzle in stock!

The Beeb got talking to the young lassie behind the counter and the topic moved to music. In all innocence, she asked him if he had ever heard of Spotify!!! 

A delicacy of Balboa Island is Frozen Banana and we stopped at the original outlet, which has been trading since 1945.

The Beeb got a Frozen Banana Split..... which could feed a family of four for a week!



We had dinner at The Village Inn, where we were fortunate to get a table.

The town was really busy as a parade of boats was about to get underway and this had drawn in a lot of visitors.


Dinner for us was sharing a huge plate of Nachos and chips, while Domenic had a clam chowder type of soup.

We missed the boat parade due to The Beeb having a war injury (torn tendon) which was getting quite painful due to all the walking that we had done.

The ferry route was our way off the island, which was a really short and inexpensive journey. We had spent so much time in Balboa and it was now dark any plans to go on to Newport Beach and Huntington Beach were shelved.

Domenic took us back back to L.A. via a bit of Pacific Coast Highway, and through the beach road running along the coast of Huntington Beach where Minty got a tantalising look at the sign for Rubys Diner on the Pier, home of the recently opened Jan & Dean Tiki Bar as we drove through.

Our route home also took us past the big Naval installation at Seal Beach.