Yay!
Sounds like a good plan! I will be anxious to hear where you end up for a hotel/motel.
Since you and your son are fish fanatics, I think this Catalina trip is meant to be! You obviously have got to do the Flying Fish tour while you're in Avalon. Probably the Semi-Submersible too. And when you are heading over to the Island on the Express, make sure you sit outside (usually the outside seating is on the upper deck) so you can scout for dolphins and other sea life.
The Long Beach Aquarium is very close to where the Express in Long Beach is. You should enjoy the Aquarium.
Be sure that you end up at the right Long Beach location for the Express. If you read PrincessInOz's report, she ended up at the Queen Mary first - which was totally
my fault, because the last time I was in Catalina, the Express boats were still departing from the Queen Mary and I instructed her to go there. I didn't realize they had changed things! Now they have turned the Queen Mary location of Catalina Express into departures for campers and large groups. The Downtown Long Beach landing - which is not far from the Queen Mary - is where you want to go! That's the dock for the general public.
As soon as you register with Catalina Express for the free birthday boat ride, they will e-mail you the voucher for it within minutes. I've already got mine and I'm not going until July 21. Then I would recommend making your Express boat reservations right away - since the time frame you are going is over 4th of July weekend, it's entirely possible many of the Express boat times may book up early.
In fact, not only should you book your hotel early and your Express boat early, you may even want to book a couple of the tours you want to do early. Even though you can generally just go up to the ticket windows when you get to the Island and book the tours, again, since it will be 4th of July weekend you may want to secure your spots in advance.
Don't forget to check in advance to be sure your son will be able to do the zipline and that they don't have an age limit - I know there are two different ziplines. One of them is like the 'advanced' one for the bigger thrill seekers, and one of them is more for the timid folks! I am hoping he can at least do the one for timid folks, but check to be sure.
Now...as for food...welll, this is where I hope I can get PrincessInOz and pixarmom to come over to this thread to add their two cents on the food and other things, as they have been to Avalon more recently than I have.
Assuming the food has not gone tremendously downhill, there are quite a few places you can eat that are good. Most of the places are casual - this is very much a beachy, shorts and t-shirt kind of town. Even the steakhouse (Steve's) probably hosts mostly shorts-clad guests!
Let's see...if you like seafood (which I do not), Armstrong's is supposed to be very good. Also, the green pier that you can see in my pictures has a walk-up counter service place that supposedly has very good fish and chips and other seafood and finger foods.
Unless it has moved or been renamed, there is a good (and usually busy) walk-up place called Coney Island West. It doesn't look like much of anything, but if your son likes burgers/chili burgers, hot dogs and shakes and that kind of thing, this is a good place to get them. I had a really good chili burger there once.
In Avalon, you will find two restaurants called Antonio's. One of them is a tiny hole in the wall on a side street, and the larger version of Antonio's is right next to where Armstrong's is, along the water. I like the one next to Armstrong's best because you can ask for a waterside table and then....look for bright orange Garibaldi fish in the water below!! (See? It all goes back to the fish!!)
Antonio's (the one by the water) has a pretty good variety of food, including all kinds of Italian things. They have pretty good pizza. They have pretty good garlic bread. They have all kinds of things.
There is a restaurant called The Cottage. It used to be called The Pancake Cottage and was an excellent place to get delicious pancakes or other breakfast items, but somewhere since I was last there they changed it to The Cottage. I think they still serve breakfast, but it sounds like they must have branched out into other meals too!
Keep in mind that when you are walking along the main street (Crescent) in the tiny town of Avalon, you will see certain restaurants right there along the sidewalk. Don't hesitate to turn down some of the side streets - which I think a lot of folks forget to do. I know there other places to eat along some of the side streets.
There are all kinds of other restaurants too - and 99% of them are casual, even if they are sit down places. At Antonio's you can crush peanut shells into the floor and decorate beaten up $1 bills to be plastered later to the wall or ceiling! Not exactly fine dining!
One side note/anecdote about one of my trips to Catalina....back in 2001, Nicolas Cage and Lisa Marie Presley were together. We saw them walking through Avalon at night, and then they disappeared into the darkness. It was an interesting site because he is so tall and she is much shorter than I expected. I think they had a bodyguard with them, although Avalon is not the sort of place where people pay much attention to celebrities.
Anyway, I think this trip in which we saw Nicolas Cage and Lisa Marie Presley took place over either Memorial Day weekend or Labor Day weekend (it was before September 11th - that much I know).
A few days later I was reading in US magazine an article about what celebrities had done for the holiday weekend, and there was a distant photo of Lisa Marie and Nicolas on a boat in the Avalon harbor. I guess they were staying on a boat and had come into town to eat or whatever when we saw them...and it turned out that I guess they had a big fight on the boat and Lisa Marie's ring (either the engagement ring or the wedding ring) ended up in the ocean, never to be found.
So somewhere in the waters of Catalina, Lisa Marie's ring from Nicolas Cage found its final resting place. But when we saw them walking through town, they didn't necessarily look unhappy. They didn't really look happy, either. But they didn't appear to be having a huge fight.
And also, as you may or may not know - the waters off of Catalina (specially, Two Harbors, which is on the other side of the Island) are where actress Natalie Wood died on that fateful night when she was on a boat with Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken. She had her last public meal with the two men at Doug's Harbor Reef restaurant in Two Harbors.
They all got drunk, headed back to their boat which was docked in the harbor...and Natalie fell overboard (or whatever happened to her), to her death. Apparently, Natalie was not a swimmer and she was terribly afraid of water, especially in the dark of night when the water is practically black. She didn't mind being on water, in a boat, or near water, on a beach, but she did not swim so she did not like to be IN water. So you can imagine how horrible it was to die in the way she feared most, I suppose.