I was just there in June for the Rock N Roll Marathon (finished in 5 hours, thank-you-very-much) and had an awesome time. My limbs were a bit too sore to stick around for the beach or really anything else, but it was the perfect weather and locale for the event. Someday I'll definitely go back---can't get enough of SD in the O.C. :)
So check this out. The article appeared in the NY Times, but was reported by a San Diego Journal writer...
San Diego Journal
The Weather’s Fine, Hence the Invasion From Arizona
San Diego has long drawn summer visitors from Arizona like Richard Holland and his 11-year-old daughter, Haley, of Phoenix.
SAN DIEGO — Bulletin: Phoenix and Tucson have been evacuated because of summer heat and monsoonal moisture. The emergency shelter is here, or so it seems, for the displaced Arizonans.
Here they come, seemingly all of southern Arizona — Zonies in the local vernacular — with their children, their friends, their cars, their strange folkways, a mass exodus from one kind of sand to another, as if propelled by desert winds into ocean breezes.
Make that hot desert winds. “Because it’s like a thousand degrees in Phoenix,” said Haley Holland, 11, walking in from a morning on the beach as her father and friends sipped drinks on the deck of their rental cottage atop the Crystal Pier.
The joke in Arizona is that if you are trying to find your friend in July or August, look on the beach here. In some hotels, three-quarters or more of the summer guests are Arizonans, who fly one hour or drive five or six to exchange triple-digit temperatures for San Diego’s breeze-kissed 70s and 80s.
“You can sit on this sand and not burn your butt off,” said Jim Phelps of Phoenix, who regularly settles into an oceanfront hotel.
Calling them Zonies is done with only the utmost affection, of course: the bad driving, crowded beaches and restaurants, jammed parking lots, clueless ocean swimming, touristy attire and endless requests for directions.
“Zonies go home” bumper stickers are a thing of years past, or so says the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau, which smiles through the invasion.
Arizonans account for 11 percent of overnight visitors, more than any other state but California. They spend $970 million annually, a hefty chunk of the $6.9 billion in annual tourist spending.
Or as Richard Holland, Haley’s father, put it: “They loan us their city for a couple of months, we pay them to enjoy it, we leave. It’s a nice deal.”
All the economic support, Mr. Holland suggested, justifies any inconvenience he and his lot may impose. “When I cut across seven lanes of traffic to make that exit in 100 yards or less, I figure my Arizona plates give me diplomatic immunity,” he said.
The ribbing follows the longstanding American tradition practiced by residents of many tourist zones, to poke fun at visitors and blame them for ills (think of the “bennies,” a term of disputed origin, that Jersey Shore residents gripe about all summer).
The San Diego-Arizona connection, though, pits two fast-growing Sun Belt regions jockeying for stature. It seemed easier to make fun of Phoenix before it surpassed San Diego in population, in 1997, according to the Census Bureau. Phoenix is now the nation’s fifth-largest city, with 1.5 million residents, and San Diego the eighth, with 1.26 million, the latest census estimates say.
David Moye, a San Diego writer who has blogged about the annoyances posed by Zonies (as a teenager, the Zonie girls didn’t always go for “townies” like him, he said), attributed picking on Arizonans as an effort by San Diegans to feel superior.
“There is a lot of angst, aggression, seething personalities among natives, partly because we are always in the shadow of L.A.,” Mr. Moye said.
“When you have good weather all the time,” he added, “you have to find something to be cranky about, if you can’t blame the weather.”
Jason Smith, a waiter in Coronado, just across the San Diego Bay, said the Arizonans were “nice enough” — got to keep those tips coming — but “sometimes they act like they are locals, like they’ve been coming here so long they feel like they own the place and don’t care if they crowd the natives out.”
And they have been coming for a long time.
Of course, there is also somewhat of a reverse flow; legions of Southern Californians have relocated to southern Arizona, seeking relief from exorbitant housing costs. And Phoenicians and Tucsonans have been known to make sport of “snowbirds” descending on their region from the Midwest and the East in the winter.
Nicole Nottoli, proprietor of the Big Kahuna’s ice cream stand on the Pacific Beach boardwalk here, estimates 60 percent of her business comes from Arizonans, and she can easily pick them out.
“Those big hats, touristy dress, pale skin,” Ms. Nottoli said.
And there is the matter of air-conditioning. Arizonans just love it; coastal San Diegans prefer the natural kind. So imagine the looks when the Zonies ask for the AC to be turned on or up at restaurants and hotels — and then search for the heat when the “bone-chilling” nighttime temperature dips below 70.
Mr. Phelps pleads guilty. He said he was staying in one of the few oceanfront hotels that provide air-conditioning: “That’s the reason I like that place.”
As he and his friends talked and joked in a shopping mall elevator recently, a longtime San Diegan turned and asked, “You’re from Arizona, aren’t you?”
“We still don’t know how she knew,” said Mr. Phelps, who, for the record, was wearing a dark print shirt tucked into khaki shorts that, well, did not quite completely blend in with the T-shirts-and-jammers crowd.
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