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Southern Spain around Grenada. Sierra Nevada is big mountain country with 11,000 foot peaks and skiing. Palm trees at the Playa de Grenada. Isola 2000 isn’t much of a drive from Nice. You can get to the Italian Alps quickly from the Italian Riviera.
LA barely gets to 68F in August which is my personal level of comfort for swimming. I suppose you could get from Santa Monica to Bear Mountain in 2 hours at 4am. Not that I’d want to ski Bear Mountain. Mammoth is 5 hours with no traffic.
Newsflash: All along the Eastern Seaboard is "swimmable" water … & warmer temps too.
In fairness, and their post seemed pretty obvious (I guess it wasn’t) that it was referring to winter, seeing the OP wants a beach within close proximity to snow and mountains. Southern California would be the only swimmable without instant hypothermia in winter. It’s not gonna be too comfortable, and you won’t spend all day out there with temps in the upper 50’s/low 60’s, but it’s doable, especially on a warm sunny day. I’ve done it plenty, and I’m not the only one out there.
During the winter the northeast is gonna have water in the low 30’s/mid 40’s, and the pacific northwest’s water will be in the mid 40’s/low 50’s.
Yeah, I'm looking for a place where it's a 10-15 minute drive from a snowy ski mountain to a tropical beach with palm trees, with a major city in between the two, but a major city that has a lot of rural, bucolic suburbs, and has low crime, low real estate prices, a growing tech industry with higher than average salaries, legal casinos but that don't dominate the city and a major international airport with direct flights to anywhere in the US and most places in Europe and Asia as well....
The closest to all that that I can think of would be Vegas, but with Lake Mead instead of an ocean. Also, Reno/Tahoe would be similar.
Bellingham, WA is beautiful but the ocean isn't swimmable up there. That's a waste of an ocean, to me.
San Diego and L.A. aren't too far from mountains but you seem unwilling to go 2 hours. I think what you're looking for doesn't exist, except perhaps in Bellingham, which is only good if you weren't planning on actually swimming in the ocean or enjoying a sunny day there (because the PNW has the most depressing, grey weather for the majority of the year).
EDITED TO ADD: I didn't think Bellingham was on the ocean... I just checked, and it's in fact on a bay, which is off of a strait, anyway. When someone says "ocean" I'd imagine he wants the real ocean, the open, wavy, salt-water ocean. Straits and Bays are more like big lakes than like ocean beaches. I'd rather be near Lake Mead where there's more you can do than in Bellingham Bay.
Thing is, when you find the bolded, which is highly desirable to a large percentage of people i see posting on here, the range of amenities do not allow low prices to be present. To get all that, you will pay for it.
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