Carnival Radiance Catalina Day · Is Renting a Golf Cart Worth It?

Avalon is a tender port, the town is small enough to walk in twenty minutes, and the golf cart rental places are right there on the front as you step off the pier. So the obvious question is whether a two hour cart rental is worth your port day money, or whether you should just wander the main drag and get back on the ship.

We did the cart. This is what it actually gets you, including the views you cannot reach on foot, what it costs to run, and the one wild animal we did not expect to find.

Getting Ashore

We came in to Avalon on the Carnival Radiance on a morning that was supposed to be overcast, cloudy, and dreary, and turned out to be flawless. We had planned to get our tender around 9:00 with the cart booked for 10:00, and to get priority tender we needed to be in the dining room between 8:00 and 9:00.

The morning announcement said we had been cleared by the local authorities, which Christina found funny given that nothing had changed since we left the same stretch of coast the night before. For the record, it is all technically the LA County Sheriff’s Department out here.

Right where you land there is a small play park, which is a genuinely useful thing to know if you are cruising with kids and need to let them burn off some energy before you start walking. There is also a little beach right there. We would not get in the water in April, because it is probably not much over 50 to 55 degrees, but in summer it would be a nice spot to sit.

The moorings are full of private boats. It is about 26 miles across to San Pedro or Long Beach, so if you keep a boat at Marina del Rey, San Pedro, or Long Beach, you can run over for the day or the weekend and pay the daily mooring rate.

Finding the Cart

We had prepaid, which we would recommend. The rental office turned out to be directly behind where we had stopped to admire the view, so do not overthink finding it. Walk up the main drag and it is there.

The important thing they hand you is a map with a suggested route that gives you a proper tour of the island’s accessible roads. That mattered more than we expected, because as Tony noted somewhere up in the hills, the signage is not great.

Two things to know about the cart itself. It is a gas cart, not electric. And the suspension is, being generous, theoretical. The roads up in the hills are rough and you will hear the whole thing rattling like it is about to come apart. It does not. Christina drove and reported that the accelerator is basically all or nothing, which takes a few minutes to get used to.

Top speed is not fast. We were passed by cars and by at least one other golf cart, and we pulled over to let both by, because we had two hours and absolutely nowhere to be.

The Route: What You Actually See

Out of the rental lot you make a right and start climbing. Almost immediately you get views back down over the harbor and the ship, and past Lover’s Cove where the snorkelers are.

The first big overlook is the payoff. You are high above Avalon looking down at the bay, the moored boats, the Catalina Express coming across from Long Beach or San Pedro, another one from Marina del Rey, and your ship sitting out there. From up there you can pick out your own cabin. We could see the aft of the Radiance with our balcony sticking out the back of the ship, which is a strange and very satisfying thing to spot from a hillside.

Los Angeles was invisible behind a fog bank on our day, which somehow made it feel further from the mainland than 26 miles.

The route then takes you through a residential stretch with old stucco facades in a Spanish style, small apartment buildings, and a housing community where all the houses look much the same. It is genuinely charming. You pass a park, a public exercise area, and a fire station that Tony was openly impressed by.

Further up you reach the botanical garden and what used to be a bird park. We did not go into the gardens, but we did stop at the old aviary. This was once the largest bird park in the world and it is now private property, fenced off, though you can still see the steel of the aviary structure standing back there. Worth a stop just to look at it.

Nearby is Hermit Gulch campground, with tent sites and some cabins with mesh window coverings, so if you do not own a tent you can still roll out a sleeping bag. There are bathrooms and a trading post, which was closed when we passed.

From there the road climbs again behind the hill above the Casino, past the zipline area and more overlooks, then drops down toward Descanso Beach Club with its white cabanas, back past the Casino, and into town.

The Wildlife

The native wildlife here is the mule deer and the Catalina Island fox, which is found nowhere else on earth. We passed a sign about them and Christina assumed it was a joke sign.

It was not a joke sign. There was a fox standing right there beside the road in front of a house. Tony initially thought a man photographing it was just taking a picture of himself, or that the resident thought he was a silver fox. No, there was an actual fox. They are tiny, properly tiny, and the one we saw was full grown before it slipped up into the brush.

There are also bison on the island, but those are inland and we were never going to find them from Avalon.

Down at the pier, look over the side for the garibaldi, the bright orange fish that is the official marine fish of the state and unmistakable from above. There was a whole cluster of them right under the pier. We also spotted two large pelicans on the way up the hill, and a very content three legged dog living his best life at one of the overlooks.

The eucalyptus up there smells incredible. They are not native to Southern California, they burn easily, and they have shallow roots so they blow over readily, which is why we took ours down at home. They still smell amazing.

What It Costs to Be Out Here

We passed a small gas station on the hill road. In April 2026, gas on Catalina Island was $8.52 per gallon.

That single number explains a lot about pricing on the island. Everything has to come across 26 miles of water.

Lunch and the Afternoon

We had lunch at the Blue Rose Mexican restaurant in town. Honest assessment: it was fine. Not great, not bad, somewhere in the middle. Perfectly acceptable port day lunch, not a reason to plan your day around.

You can drive the carts along part of Crescent Avenue, but there is a stretch right in front of the beaches that is pedestrian only, so plan for that. The Catalina Island Yacht Club is members only, in case you were thinking about lunch there. We were not.

Down on the pier there is a small cluster of things: kayak and pedal boat rentals, a submarine excursion desk, dive and snorkel operators, parasailing, and Eric’s on the Pier style seafood and fish and chips at the end. By 12:45 there were people braving the water, which we admired from a safe and dry distance. It takes a lot for Southern California water to warm up, and the end of April is nowhere near it.

The best find on the pier is the Old Ben statue, and the plaque is worth reading. Old Ben was a large and unusually friendly seal who lived around Avalon from 1898 into the 1920s. He would pose for photographs on the pleasure pier and accept a raw fish as payment, and swimmers remembered the occasional intimate nudge as he went past. The sculpture was created by Stanley Rosen and given to the city of Avalon by Hermine and Stanley Rosen in gratitude to his father Bernath Rosen, an Avalon pioneer from 1886. Placing it was a bicentennial project of the Avalon Beautiful Association in September 1975.

So Is the Golf Cart Worth It?

Yes, and here is the specific reason. Avalon town is walkable and pleasant, but the town is not why you come to Catalina. The hills above it are. The overlooks, the view down onto the bay with your ship sitting in it, the old aviary, the road behind the Casino, the fox: none of that is reachable on foot in a port day window.

Two hours was exactly right. We were never rushed, we stopped whenever we wanted, and we were back down in town with time for a leisurely lunch before the last tender at 4:45.

A few practical notes if you go. Prepay so you are not standing in the line we drove past on our way out. Take the route map they give you and actually follow it. Expect the cart to rattle and the ride to be rough. And get an early cart if you can, because the whole point is having the hills to yourself.

We had done a self guided scavenger hunt around the island on a previous visit through an app, which was a lot of fun. This time we essentially recreated that on our own with the cart, and it worked just as well. Either way, get up that hill.