Second-to-last stop on our tour of California. From cozy Balboa Island to my hometown, Long Beach.

And if this trip has been almost entirely about seeing how close we can get to the ocean, we have come to the right place. The windows of the condo we are renting afford a wide view out on the sand, just below us, and the Pacific Ocean begins about 75 yards from the kitchen table.

This should work fine.

I did not properly appreciate Long Beach as a child. (What child properly appreciates any good thing in his life?) I assumed everyone was close to be a beach, or could be if they wanted. It was all I knew. I lived four blocks from the ocean.

For most of the past three decades, I’ve been 50-60 miles from the ocean. And as anyone who lives in the IE can tell you, that 50 miles from the ocean may as well be 1,000, when it comes to weather.

Now, we are watching the ocean wash gently up the shore from the second floor place we are renting, and after night falls and the cyclists and joggers and walkers and skaters stop gliding past on the ribbon of bike path about 30 feet from where I’m sitting … it’s is easily quiet enough to hear the break of the wavelets coming ashore. It’s a great lullaby.

A curious thing about Abu Dhabi is that it is right on the water — it’s an island, for goodness sakes — but is the least beachy beach city I’ve known. The frontage is limited, the vista on the Corniche is blocked by Lulu Island, the Gulf produces minimal tides at that spot … and it’s so hot six months of the year that only mad dogs and Englishmen would lay out on that beach.

Long Beach isn’t an au natural beach setting because of the breakwater built during World War II to create a major navy base here. The Navy is gone, but the breakwater remains, and a south-facing beach that 70 years ago had waves big enough to surf, now generates mostly harmless little, shin-high rollers.

But the climate is perfect. Again. High of 75. Low of 60. Low clouds in the morning, burning off about noon. And when we get bored, we just look out the 25 feet of windows on the front of the place and see sailboats in the ocean and feel the wind on our faces and hear the waves rolling in.

Long Beach, the least appreciated of Southern California beach towns. Miles and miles of a wide beach (hence the name of the city) with perfect white sand, nearly always almost empty.

Bad for tourism, great for the tourist. If I were any more chilled out, I would be frozen.