A Dry Heat Drives Arizonans to San Diego

There are a hundred reasons Arizonans like to visit San Diego. Some days there are 115 or even 120.

When the summer heat descends on Phoenix and environs, the westward migration on Interstate 8 begins: 350 miles to the beach or bust.

Arizonans call it the vacation season. To San Diegans, it’s the annual Invasion of the Zonies.

If so, it’s an invasion that pays enormous dividends to the invaded. San Diego depends on tourists to underwrite the amenities that tax-averse locals would rather brag about than pay for: the Old Globe Theatre, the museums of Balboa Park, the opera, the symphony, the well-groomed beaches.

Boosters predict the biggest-ever summer influx of visitors this year. The prediction is part number-crunching, part optimistic wish.

A downturn in tourism, or even a shortfall in predictions, could leave the city budget awash in red ink. Tax activists are alarmed at how heavily the city’s fiscal health is tied to the largess of tourists and the hotel-motel tax fund.

When you’re talking tourists in San Diego, you’re talking Arizona.

Of San Diego’s annual 15 million visitors, 12% are from Arizona, the most of any state outside California.

True, 30% of San Diego’s visitors are from the Los Angeles area, but Angelenos tend to blend in with the locals. Zonies are easily spotted by their distinctive license plates and their expressions of wonderment at being in a place where 84 degrees on a summer day qualifies as hot and where sand is at the beach, not in the backyard.

Zonie-watching--and in some cases, Zonie-insulting--has become a local sport.

“Every area has to have a group it can make fun of,” said Peter Rowe, Zonie-teasing columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune. “The Zonies are irresistible.”

Zonie lore abounds: Car-driving Zonies making left turns from the right-hand lane. Water-going Zonies violating protocol at surf breaks. Entertainment-seeking Zonies hogging the best parking spaces, tee times and dinner reservations.

Anecdotes that begin “I saw a Zonie in a big Caddie . . . “ are the local equivalent of the vaudeville opener about a priest, a rabbi and a streetcar.

Ron Hamel, co-owner of Hamel’s Action Sports Center off the boardwalk at Mission Beach, says it happens every year: Zonies arrive ill-prepared for the temperate climate and rush to buy sweatshirts and sweatpants while locals are buying tank tops and string bikinis.

“Some places have the grunion running on the beach,” Hamel notes. “San Diego has the Zonies.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) tells San Diego audiences that he loves coming here because it is a great opportunity to talk to Arizona voters. It’s a sure-fire laugh line.

So many Arizona residents come to San Diego that the Arizona Republic, the state’s largest newspaper, put out a daily beach edition last summer, sold at San Diego hotels and beaches.

Some summers the newspaper has set up a San Diego bureau, with reporters filing stories for readers back home whose vacations are yet to come. The newspaper’s publisher is a frequent San Diego tourist.

To keep the Zonies coming, the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau makes sure that the Arizona public does not forget the joys of surf, sand and sun (at a moderate temperature). The San Diego Zoo takes some of its more attractive and portable animals on a road trip to Arizona.

A decade ago, Phoenix officials put out ads pleading in a tongue-in-cheek campaign: “Stay At Home. Air-Conditioning Is Fun.”

San Diego retaliated with ads suggesting that Arizona is so hot in the summer that “the patio furniture is standing on one leg” and that you can have fun in San Diego “without your ears catching fire.”

Now the San Diego ads are more subtle: “Circulated air is not what summers are made of. At least in San Diego . . . where the entire family’s sweat glands get a vacation.”

Much of the advertising battle, of course, is irrelevant to the Zonies, as they are drawn to the three sirens of San Diego tourism: the beach, Sea World and the world-famous zoo. Many come from families where San Diego vacations are a tradition going back decades.

“I remember coming here in the 1980s and doing all those things in Mission Beach and Pacific Beach that you do in your 20s,” said Steve Mendenhall, 41, owner of a surgical monitoring firm in Phoenix, as he, his wife, their son and another couple arrived for a day at the zoo.

“What’s the point of staying in Phoenix during the summer?” Mendenhall said. “All you can do is lay out by the pool, and you can’t even do that after 2 p.m.”

Explained Michael Turner, 12, of Phoenix: “I’ve had more fun in a week here than in two years in Arizona.”

For the most part, Zonies and locals coexist, save for an occasional upraised middle finger aimed at a Zonie motorist or a “Zonies Go Home” sign at the beach.

“I think some of the San Diego drivers want us off the road,” said Sarah Fluhr, 21, a homeowners association manager from Phoenix, as she sipped beer at the Coaster Saloon, a popular Mission Beach beer-and-burgers joint.

Visitors to San Diego pay $100 million in hotel-motel taxes a year, which City Hall distributes to arts groups, environmental projects and other things enjoyed by local residents long after the tourists return to Tucson or Flagstaff or Los Angeles.

If a downtown ballpark for the Padres is ever built, it will be financed largely by hotel-motel taxes, not by property or sales taxes paid by locals.

Taxis this summer have sprouted rooftop signs reading: “Let Me Show You The City Tourism Built.”

Economic dependency does not breed affection. There was considerable consternation a few summers ago when figures indicated that Phoenix was pushing ahead of San Diego in the ranking of America’s most populous cities.

San Diego civic sensibilities were soothed when reporters finally tracked down the mayor of Phoenix for comment.

He was where he is every summer: on the beach in San Diego.