I went off to work bright and early – catching a ride in with a co-worker – after having a lovely (free, hotel) breakfast with J and Ava. They didn’t have any hard and fast plans for the day other than hitting a park or two and chasing down a few geocaches.
I’m guessing they had a good day. I wouldn’t know since there aren’t any pictures (thanks, honey).
After work we’d planned to walk ’round the Gaslamp District for a while and grab dinner somewhere along the way. Well, one thing turned into another and we ended up with a rather large group of folks that wanted to meet up for dinner. So that’s what we did instead. Another co-worker lined up a restaurant in Old Town as my requested cuisine was simple. I wanted good, real Mexican food. Easy enough, right?
Except nobody told us exactly how difficult it can be to drive in Old Town San Diego since every street we found was one way only and not ever going in the direction we needed to go. We finally gave up, parked, and started walking toward the center in the hopes that we would stumble upon the restaurant. Fortunately we did – helped in large part by the frantic shouting and waving of one of the members of our party as he spotted us walking by for the fifteenth time.
The food? Yum. We don’t often get Mexican food like that at home. The company? Fantastic. Many of these people are more than co-workers to me. They are friends that I don’t get to see nearly often enough. The margaritas? They were HUGE! And the entertainment?
Well, my little tourist heart was charmed when the (incomplete) Mariachi band showed up. They asked what we were celebrating or if we had any specific requests and before any of us could really formulate an answer they launched into a really, really loud version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. All 17 or so minutes of it.
Ava didn’t know what to think.
She was stunned, I think. As were the rest of us. Heck, the song droned on for so long that we were seriously thinking of giving them a bigger tip if they’d just stop playing and move on. Fortunately we were sitting in the middle of the table and could kind of ignore them – unlike the poor folks at the end who had to look appreciative of and interested in the whole entire performance.
It was a great dinner that went for hours. You know, one of those nights where you can sit with good friends and talk (and drink) the night away.
Well, except for the fact that we (almost) all had our kids there and therefore had a curfew stricter than any we’d ever had growing up…