Weekend Special : Getaways Without Going Far : Four Nearby Escapes for People With Different Tastes, Moderate Budgets and Little Time : La Jolla : A ‘Private’ Club for Sun Lovers

For a weekend of relaxation, it’s hard to beat going to the beach. And among beach communities, it’s hard to beat La Jolla. You walk on the sand, squint up at the sun, nibble some seafood. If you want to add a dimension to your beach experience, you sample the new public aquarium.

All of which my wife and I did in the space of 50-odd hours there, between such urgent engagements as people-watching on trendy Prospect and Girard streets, inspecting a recently arisen crop of new cafes, coffee houses and restaurants and purposelessly patrolling the cliff tops with ocean views.

But our lodgings were just as important to the trip as our wanderings. We stayed at the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club, which sprawls beneath such an aura of exclusivity that most San Diegans would never imagine it is possible to stay there for a reasonable price. But if you avoid the summer and major holidays, and you reserve in advance, you can get a double room--and by extension, full member’s privileges and free tennis on professional-quality courts--for just under $100 a night. For little more, you can get a kitchenette.

The atmosphere might be a little monocultural for some tastes--picture dozens of well-tanned, well-toned WASPs, male and female, bounding about on the courts, sipping drinks on the patio, chatting by the red deck around the pool. (The waiting list to join the club is 10-years long; employees, reluctant to discuss dues, say a member’s costs are likely to reach five figures in the first two years.) But if tourists to Los Angeles can stroll through Chinatown and Olvera Street and appreciate them as unaccustomed experiences, why not this place, too?

Location may be the club’s principal advantage. The 14-acre property, seen from above as a crescent of grass, palms, immaculate tennis courts and red-tile roofing, borders a long chunk of La Jolla Shores beach. (The beach is legally public, but dominated by the club and its guests.) It’s a five-minute drive to the shops, restaurants and people-watching of La Jolla’s central village area--or if you’re so inclined, just a one-mile ocean swim.

If you don’t want to go anywhere, you can pull up one of the club’s beach chairs, grab a club towel and laze on the sand, a wooden board positioned to shield your body from the wind.

Not every detail of the club fits its reputation. Some buildings have the lived-in feeling one gets after 40 years in damp, salty air, and interiors in some of the 90 rooms and apartments can be modest. We were alarmed to find one 10-foot-long wall of our room covered by garish pine-trees-at-sunset photo-wallpaper. (I believe our wall was one of a kind; I saw nothing like it in any of the other rooms I looked in on.) But the service was first-rate, the restaurant was satisfying, and for a committed tennis player, the 12 free courts (four of them with night lighting) would be irresistible.

What else? We ate Italian and seafood. We went to the new aquarium--properly, the Stephen Birch Aquarium-Museum--on one of its busiest days since its opening in mid-September.

Even with ranks six deep at some windows, and dashing children and bedraggled parents pressing in on all sides, the place was pleasure--especially in contrast to the dankness and darkness of the Scripps Institution’s old facility. The tide pools outside, the wing of hands-on educational exhibits and the gift shop give the place a broad balance. When you have gray wolf eels, leopard sharks and orange anemones on your side, however, it must be hard to go wrong. (A word to those with flexible schedules: The aquarium crowds can reach 3,000 a day on weekends, and fall to a third of that on weekdays.)

On the shopping streets, we reviewed the old stand-by businesses of the village, from The Ascot Shop (now there’s a clue to La Jolla’s demographics for you) to John Cole’s Bookshop, not forgetting the 66-year-old, pink-walled, bougainvillea-shrouded La Valencia Hotel. We also stumbled into Catalina’s Music of the World, a tiny cafe and den of compact discs.

Owner Ibrahim Hammidi has run the place on the 8000 block of Girard Avenue since 1987, steadily building a staggeringly diverse collection of international music in a rack on one wall of the shop. He says the inventory is only about 700 recordings, but it runs from Guanajato organ music to John Coltrane, and the proprietor, 60 years old and Lebanon-born, seems to be an authority on, well, most anything. I went in to pass 15 minutes before a reservation elsewhere and departed, charmed and $21.98 poorer, with a 1988 recording of a kora player from Mali jamming with an English bass player and a Spanish flamenco group.

We rested our legs in a new snack shop, the Wall Street Cafe, in a former bank building, its restrooms now housed behind the shiny steel vault door, its espresso maker protected by bullet-proof glass. And of course we stood above La Jolla Cove and looked north.

From there, a visitor sees the tide surging in and out of ocean caves, snorkelers bobbing, deep green moss enduring on the shady side of the shore stones, and on the hillside above it all, the disparately designed homes of the impossibly fortunate.

Up on the UC San Diego campus, we nodded and giggled over some of the outdoor artworks that make up the campus’ Stuart Collection. (The most recent, by Alexis Smith, is a pathway in the shape of a 560-foot-long coiled snake, its forked tongue darting toward the school library.)

Out amid the cliff-top scrub and pebbles of Torrey Pines State Reserve, we picked our way along winding footpaths and stared at a horizon of nothing but ocean, glare and air.

Back at the club, we walked at the water’s edge beneath palm fronds and stars, sipped nightcaps at the surf-lashed Marine Room bar, and halted to hear what sounded like a goose orgy in the nearby lagoon.

Surely we must have done more than that. But that’s the thing with time spent in the company of sun and sea: All else is bleached away.

GUIDEBOOK

The Joy of La Jolla

Getting there: La Jolla lies just west of Interstate 5, 90 miles south of downtown Los Angeles and 15 miles north of San Diego’s Lindbergh Field airport. All the addresses noted below are in La Jolla (ZIP code 92037), which is a community within the City of San Diego.

Where to stay: The La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club, 2000 Spindrift Drive, (800) 624-2582; rates for 90 guest rooms, from modest studios to spacious apartments for several people with kitchens and ocean views, range from $95 to $265, mid-September to mid-June. During summer months and holidays, those numbers rise--and longtime customers have first call on prime rooms. No room is more than a short walk from the beach.

Alternative accommodations: If you want to perch higher above the Pacific, walk to most of the community’s shops and restaurants and claim La Jolla’s best-known hotel address, stay at the La Valencia Hotel, 1132 Prospect St., (800) 451-0772 or (619) 454- 0771. The pink-walled Spanish-style hotel, which dates to the 1920s, charges from $135 nightly for a double room to $600 for a suite overlooking the sea. For more modest budgets, the 30-room La Jolla Cove Travelodge, 1141 Silverado St., (800) 255-3050 or (619) 454-0791, has clean, tasteful rooms (no pool, no restaurant) and weekend rates that start at $49, with no rooms more costly than $69.

Where to eat: A block or so off the village’s most beaten paths, Sante, 7811 Herschel Ave., (619) 454-1315, has been quietly offering north Italian cuisine for about five years. The dining room is dim, with linen tableclothes, fresh flowers on the tables and roses for ladies as they leave. The quail and mushroom ravioli is excellent. Dinner entrees run $12-$22.

For those who stay at La Jolla Shores, the Shores restaurant, 8110 Camino del Oro, (619) 456-0600, lies close at hand, and, though affiliated with the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club, it’s open to the public. Mostly seafood, pasta and a handful of specialty salads; entrees $9.95-$19.95.

Two of La Jolla’s most popular restaurants offering ocean views and seafood menus are Top O’ the Cove, 1216 Prospect St., (619) 454-7779, and George’s at the Cove, 1250 Prospect St., (619) 454-4244. Meals at the latter are less expensive. The 50-some-year-old Marine Room Restaurant, 2000 Spindrift Drive, (619) 459-7222--another beach-and-tennis club adjunct open to the public--is thought by many to be the area’s pre-eminent nightcap destination, lying so close to the surf that waves flooded the dining room in the storms of 1982.

Pannikin Brockton Villa, 1235 Coast Blvd., (619) 454-7393, is the first full-fledged restaurant operation for a very successful local chain of coffee houses, and seems more logically suited to breakfast and lunch than dinner. The restaurant is a remodeled 1894 cottage. Breakfasts run $4-$7; lunch entrees, $5-$9; dinners, $10-$15. A couple of coffee spots that have recently joined the area’s ever- expanding brotherhood of the bean: Cafe 928, 928 Silverado St., (619) 454-8977; and the Wall Street Cafe, 1044 Wall St., (619) 551-1044. Where to see eels: The Stephen Birch Aquarium-Museum, 2300 Expedition Way, (619) 534-3474, a part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily (except Christmas). Admission is $6.50 for adults, $4.50 for children 13-17, $3.50 for children 4-12. Parking is $2.

For more information: The La Jolla Town Council maintains a visitor information line at (619) 454-1444.