Archive for the ‘Vacation 2010’ Category
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…
Bet you can’t guess where J and Ava went while I was at work.
Okay fine, maybe you can.
Since I’d already been there the last time I was in San Diego I wasn’t terribly sad about missing out on this. Zoos tend to mostly make me feel guilty and I knew she’d never last long enough to see the whole place anyway so J took her to spend a few hours hitting the main attractions.
Which, apparently, involved trees.
And hippos.
And flamingos (Mama’s favorites).
Although clearly not even in Ava’s top 10.
She saw pandas – both real, live ones and some apparently made of solid gold or something based on the cost.
One of which she had to have (thankfully not the real one) and which Daddy was happy to provide – even going so far as to buy it a freaking sweatshirt, too. Of course Ava came away with a panda shirt as well.
Then came lunch with the elephants.
An experience that J said was worth every single penny of the $9 bowl of mac and cheese and a souvenir cup. I exaggerate…only a little, though.
After wrestling a wild beast into submission
she was about done in so they wrapped it up and headed back to the hotel for a nap until I got off from work. We set off for Seal Beach in La Jolla as soon as I wrapped up for the day, with a short detour by Souplantation for dinner. It is an understatement to say that I love Souplantation – tacky buffet it may be but we don’t have them on the East Coast so I take every opportunity I can to eat in them when I find one. And their lemon chicken orzo soup…OMG, to die for.
We lucked into finding a parking spot right near the beach. This was J’s first experience with the Pacific Ocean and he was in picture taking heaven. And I will give it to the West Coasters – y’all do win in the dramatic ocean waves and beautiful cliff scenery divisions. As much as I love my East Coast our ocean is a little wimpy compared to yours.
Seals:
Not pictured is the crazy environmentalist lady who was haranguing every single tourist who happened to wander into her path with the intent of looking at the seals. Funnily enough she didn’t approach us the same way she did most everyone else – literally coming up to some and physically blocking them from walking near the seals (which is perfectly legal, btw). I was uber-tired and most certainly had an attitude and I’m guessing she was smart enough to sense that. She seemed to be focusing on the easy targets.
Sunset:
Us, watching the sunset and watching J scramble along really steep and pointy rocks taking 9 billion pictures of the sunset.
Note the feet dangling in the last photo. Yes, we do still use the Ergo backpack fairly often when we’re walking/hiking or in places like this where it was much safer to have her contained. She loves it so there are generally no arguments from her when we break it out.
More sunset:
Pretty fabulous, eh? Just another reminder of how awesome our world is and how we need to stop and admire things like this a little more often. And yeah, the West Coast wins in the sunset division, too – but we still smoke ‘em on the sunrises.
Ava was a little freaked out though – and kept asking me why the sun was falling into the water. I started out on some long scientific explanation and then realized what I was doing. My final answer to her was that the sun was going to sleep and we’d see him again in the morning. Yeah, I kinda lied – but it was all she needed at the moment.
It was a really good day. All you have to do is look at the grin on my silly girl’s face to tell you that (and please look past the sheer exhaustion on my face ’cause it had been a really long couple of days by that point with not a whole lot of sleep for me).
