3 Months Road-Tripping the USA With a Kid: LA, San Diego & Florida — Honest Review

Most people visit the USA as tourists. We arrived as a family in transition – holding Mexican residency, mid-way through a life that has taken us from the UK to Mexico, across Europe and now into three months of American road-tripping before our next big move to Andalusia, Spain. This trip is also for my 50th birthday and I will treasure every minute of it.

That context changes everything about how you experience a place. We weren’t rushing the tourist trail. We were living. And that meant we noticed things that most travel guides completely miss.

Los Angeles — bigger, slower, stranger than expected

LA confounds you. It is not one city – it is a dozen cities loosely connected by one of the most stressful motorway systems on earth. The trick is to stop trying to see all of it and instead pick a neighbourhood and go deep. We based ourselves in a single area and treated it like a local.

What surprised us most: the wellness culture is genuinely extraordinary. Farmers markets, cold press juice bars, acupuncture clinics, functional medicine practitioners – all treated as completely normal daily life. As a nutritionist this was fascinating to observe. California has a health culture that Europe is still slowly catching up to.

What nobody tells families: the distances are brutal with a child. Budget twice as long as Google Maps suggests for everything. And eat at the taco trucks — not the Instagram restaurants. The taco trucks are better.

San Diego — the one that surprised us most

San Diego was the standout of the three cities. More manageable than LA, genuinely beautiful coastline, an outdoor lifestyle that is effortlessly family-friendly, and crucially for us – a very visible Mexican cultural influence that made it feel familiar in a way that was completely unexpected.

The food scene in San Diego is exceptional. The proximity to the Mexican border means the Mexican food here is genuinely authentic in a way that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the USA and after five years in Mexico, we are very fussy about this.

For families: Balboa Park alone is worth a week. The zoo is world-class. The beaches are safe, clean and beautiful. If you are considering the USA as a base or just a long stop – San Diego would be the city we’d return to.

Florida — a different America entirely

Florida is a world of its own. The humidity hits you like a wall. The pace is completely different from California – louder, more chaotic, more theme-parked. But there’s a version of Florida that is genuinely wonderful if you know where to look.

The nature is spectacular and deeply underrated. The Everglades, the Gulf Coast beaches, the springs – Florida has an extraordinary natural landscape that its reputation for theme parks completely overshadows. We spent time away from the main tourist corridors and were genuinely stunned by what we found.

For families with kids: the obvious draws are obvious for a reason. But budget carefully — Florida theme park pricing has become extraordinary, and the hidden costs (parking, food inside parks, add-ons) can make a family day eye-wateringly expensive.

What three months of US travel taught us

America is genuinely unlike anywhere else and that cuts both ways. The scale, the service culture, the food portions, the customer experience are all impressive in their own way. But after years of living in Mexico and travelling Europe, certain things are hard to unsee: the healthcare anxiety that underlies so much of daily life, the car dependency, the cost of simply existing in certain cities.

As a long stop between Mexico and Spain, it was perfect. As a permanent base, it confirmed for us why we’re heading to Andalusia instead.

More on that — and why we’re leaving Mexico for Spain — in the next post.