Anniversary flowers in Chula Vista

Until very recently, an anniversary dinner in Chula Vista was an anniversary dinner somewhere else. The city's western edge is three miles of bay frontage, but for decades that frontage was a working marina, a wildlife refuge and industrial land rather than a place you booked a table at — so couples drove north on Interstate 5 to downtown San Diego, or west across the Silver Strand to Coronado, and the flowers followed them out of town. The opening of the Gaylord Pacific resort and convention center on the Chula Vista Bayfront changed that geometry in a single stroke: there is now a large hotel with a front desk, a concierge and a check-in list inside the city limits, a few minutes from both of our nearest florists. The rest of the bayfront has filled in around it — the Chula Vista Marina and Bayside Park, and the Living Coast Discovery Center out on Gunpowder Point inside the Sweetwater Marsh section of the San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge, which is genuinely one of the better places in the county to walk off a long dinner. If your anniversary plan starts at the bayfront rather than ending across a bridge, the delivery gets simpler and cheaper, because a short run in the late morning beats a long one at five in the afternoon every time.

If the plan does leave the city, the two classic routes are worth understanding as delivery routes rather than scenic ones. Coronado is the romantic default: the Hotel del Coronado on Orange Avenue, open since 1888 and still the most recognizable building on this bay, and Loews Coronado Bay Resort further down the Silver Strand on Coronado Bay Road. From Chula Vista both are reached either by SR-75 along the Strand from Imperial Beach or up the 5 and over the Coronado Bridge, and the Strand route is the pleasant one and the slower one. Downtown San Diego — the Gaslamp hotels, the waterfront properties near the convention center, the Little Italy restaurant rows — is a straight seven-to-eight-mile run up the 5 or a Blue Line trolley ride from the Bayfront/E Street, H Street or Palomar Street stations. Closer to home, the restaurant rows that Chula Vista couples actually use for a weeknight anniversary are Third Avenue Village between E and G Streets, the Bonita Road corridor on the way to Glen Abbey and Rohr Park, and the newer dining around Otay Ranch Town Center off Birch Road. For any hotel, give us the guest surname and the check-in date; for a restaurant, send the flowers to the house instead, because a table drop depends on a host remembering a bag.