WEEKEND ESCAPE: LONG BEACH : A Gallery of Seaside Sights : Covering the city’s vibrant waterfront, from an art museum to the aquarium

I’ve always known that this city had intriguing bits and pieces worth seeing--museums, ranchos and now the aquarium--but I’d never thought of stringing some of them together for a weekend getaway. Long Beach seemed too near, too pedestrian for an overnight stay.

I was wrong. It’s a perfectly wonderful place for a weekend. I just had to forget my prejudices and go. I saw plenty of happy-as-a-clam tourists who seemed to think Long Beach is quintessentially California.

My friend Maria and I timed our Saturday arrival to the 11:30 a.m. opening of the Museum of Latin American Art. The building looks deceptively small because the huge warehouse-turned-gallery in back isn’t visible from the street. The museum takes its name seriously: The artists exhibited are really from all over Latin America, not just Mexico. Much of the work in the permanent collection is from the Robert Gumbiner Foundation Collection. (Gumbiner, the founder of FHP, one of the first HMOs in the country, is the moving force behind the museum.) All the pieces are contemporary, most brilliantly colored, some very surreal. All are displayed in bright, spacious galleries. My favorite work was an oil painting by Trino Sanchez of Venezuela.

We would have stayed for lunch in the museum’s Viva restaurant (the Bolivian tamales and plantains sprinkled with ginger looked tempting), but we had to move quickly to see both of Long Beach’s historic ranchos in one afternoon. They have the same short hours, 1 to 5 p.m, and are across town from each other.

We drove first to the 4.7-acre Rancho Los Cerritos, where hourly tours are the only way to see the Monterey-style adobe and its extensive gardens. Unfortunately, we had a docent who confused the six adults on his tour with sixth-graders, asking us questions like, “Anyone know what a blacksmith does?” Still, being there seemed to defy the reality of modern-day Long Beach.

We arrived at Rancho Los Alamitos by 3:30 p.m. and fell in love with it from our first moments under the pepper trees. Its warmth is mostly the work of Fred and Florence Bixby, who moved here in 1906 and began gardening and breeding shire horses. (The Bixbys made their fortune in business and oil.) Florence’s artistic sense permeates the house and made me want to move in. Her colored-glass collection fills a window, and the bedrooms are B&B; perfect. In the center of five barns is a pen with goats and sheep.

We checked in at the West Coast Long Beach Hotel (formerly a Travelodge). This is the other hotel on Queensway Drive out in the harbor, not the Queen Mary and not half bad for a chain. The location is incredible, with the Queen Mary just a few hundred yards to the right and the Long Beach skyline and San Pedro Bay sweeping off to the left. Our room had a large balcony, and we relaxed with a room-service snack of beer and mushrooms wrapped in phyllo dough. At less than $100 a night (with AAA discount), this was a great bargain.

Although we drove, we could have ditched the car and taken Long Beach’s tourist-friendly red Passport Shuttle buses, which stop at the hotel’s driveway and all the major sights in the city.

For dinner we headed to Belmont Shore, Long Beach’s hip neighborhood (like Santa Monica’s Main Street). There were plenty of places to eat, and we chose the Shenandoah Cafe, which specializes in Southern cooking. It was like being in one of those old New Orleans homes converted to a restaurant: pastels, floral wallpapers, quilts on the walls. It had some nice touches: Apple fritters arrived before we opened the menu, and the salads were finished at the table by the waiter, who showed us a basket of vegetables, asked which ones we didn’t want and added the rest to the lettuce. Maria had a bowl of chicken gumbo that could have satisfied three people.

On Sunday we decided to arrive at the Aquarium of the Pacific at opening time, 9 a.m. This turned out to be a smart move because for the first hour we could actually see the fish in the tanks. After that, it was three deep everywhere, and there was a long line outside. The aquarium was touting its Sea Otter Summer, which we thought was dullsville. We decided to move on to tanks that were lacking an audience for the moment, like the Brobdingnagian crabs, the goofy-looking puffins (the only bird exhibit) and a blind sea lion swimming endless laps.

Leaving the aquarium, we took the Passport Aquabus across the bay from the aquarium to Shoreline Village, a New England-style complex in Mexican colors, for lunch. The Aquabus just started service this summer and is a terrific idea. For $2 (exact change required) you can ride from one bay attraction to another, from the aquarium to Shoreline Village to the Queen Mary. It is scheduled to stop at the foot of Pine Avenue, but the captain said he does that only on request or if he sees someone standing at the dock. The little red boat stops at each dock every 30 minutes, but the ride is just five minutes long. We could have walked to Shoreline Village just as fast, maybe faster, but this was our little sea excursion. It didn’t seem right to spend the day beside the bay and not get on the water.

I thought we’d only find low-end pizza shacks at Shoreline Village, but we had a grand lunch at Parkers Lighthouse (an actual working lighthouse), just up the steps from the landing. The restaurant is a classy place with great design, lots of space between tables, a wonderful airy feeling and a good menu (Thai salad, Tuscan sandwich).

We sat at a third-floor window table with a view of the bay. With Louis Prima on the sound system and the lively weekend harbor life in front of us, we hated to leave.

We took the Aquabus back to our car at the aquarium, and though the boat stopped at the Queen Mary for 30 minutes, we didn’t mind a bit. We weren’t in a hurry to end our quintessential California experience.

Budget for Two

Hotel: $99.00

Breakfast: 9.00

Lunch, Parkers Lighthouse: 26.44

Dinner, Shenandoah Cafe: 44.00

Aquarium admission: 26.90

Museum of Latin American Art: 8.00

Gas: 6.00

Parking: 6.00

FINAL TAB: $225.34

West Coast Long Beach Hotel, 700 Queensway Drive; telephone (562) 435-7676.