Well, I'm back much later than I thought I'd be. I had every intention of finishing telling you about our trip to San Diego last weekend, but life happened and I got busy. So now it's Monday morning and I'm ready to wrap up our weekend stories from last week so I can move on and tell you about this past weekend. Our first morning in San Diego (Friday) we were up bright and early thanks to the time change. Since it was too early to go anywhere yet, we headed to the beach for a walk. I enjoyed taking pictures of this little fella. He was a great model.
We also sat and watched these guys for a while.
My Valentine, with part of our hotel back behind him.
On our walk, we stumbled upon the biggest and coolest sand castle I've ever seen. And I think it was built the day before since no one was around, which means it survived over night. It was huge!
I guess you could argue that this side of it was done with a mold of some sort, but I've used sand castle buckets before and mine have never turned out looking like this so I say it's still pretty impressive. It has a clock! And look at all the people standing around outside.
It was hard to get good shots of the other side of the castle thanks to the sun and shadows, but I still tried. Check out the bridge in this shot. I'm not sure what the round balls are supposed to be - boulders, maybe?
The castle even had stairs!
Here's another full view from the ocean side. I seriously spent about 10 minutes staring at this sand castle trying to figure out how in the heck someone made it. I'm going to have to step up my game the next time I'm at the beach.
There are lots of reasons why I think we should all up and move to San Diego (hello, 70 degree weather!) but one that I kept thinking about over the whole weekend was how much better my flower beds would look in San Diego. The flowers there were all beautiful!
I was kinda obsessed with these things because they were all over our resort. Don't they look like some sort of bird's head or something?
Now can you see it?
Weird, aren't they? That's how every single one of them looked - yellow/orange things sticking straight up, one blue one out at an angle, and the green base. Anybody know what those are?
Our main activity for Day Numero Uno was the zoo. You can read all about our 4+ hour adventure here.
From the zoo, we drove to the nearby Gaslamp Quarter.
This is a fun area for shopping but before we could even think about doing any of that, we needed afternoon drinks and, more importantly, to rest our feet!
We sat outside at a Mexican restaurant which was good, but it was really hard to get excited about chips and salsa when this was right across the street!
We window shopped for a bit but managed to leave the area empty-handed. We were pretty tired at this point and wanted to make it back to the beach to watch the sunset.
Not a bad way to end the day, right?
WARNING: Cheesy lovey-dovey photo coming up in 3...
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Oh yes we did take a heart sunset picture.
There's those sunglasses again...
It didn't take long at all for the sun to be swallowed up by the ocean.
Did I mention that our hotel room was one of the only ones in our building with beach access? I'm not sure how we got so lucky, but the fence around our patio had a little gate (the others did not - they had shrubs on the other side of their fence) that led right out to the beach.
And inside our little patio was this cute teeny palm tree.
After a quick dinner on Coronado Island we called it a day. We had to be up early on Saturday for our whale watching adventure. I told you I'd tell you where we went after leaving the bay...
We drove to LaJolla (pronounced LoHoya, Dad) for a very late lunch. It was late because we had to wait a while for an available table - but it was well worth the wait. Check out the view we had!
The food was pretty good too.
Our drinks here were pretty awesome. The short one on the right is a blueberry margarita that Doc has spent the last week trying to recreate. I think he's just about nailed it - they're pretty tasty!
As we left the restaurant, we passed this man who I've decided is what Doc will look like when he grows up. This man was just sitting in his full suit, smoking his cigar, enjoying his Saturday. Oh, and his blurry arm? That's because while he was sitting there he was also practicing his golf swing. Doc in a few years, I tell ya.
We walked down to a park-like area by the ocean and joined a crowd around some beautiful exotic-looking birds.
Lots of people - kids even! - were holding birds on their arms and and shoulders. Doc showed little interest in even touching one of them but I begged him to hold one. "Puh-lease hold one! Just long enough for me to get a picture! Look, that kid's doing it. It won't hurt or anything!"
He finally gave in and let the bird step up onto his arm.
It climbed up onto his shoulder...
...and then started nibbling on his ear!
He said it didn't hurt, it just felt a little weird. "Ok, let me try!" I said. "I'll come stand by you so he'll step onto my shoulder and then you can take a picture of me."
But then as Doc turned and I stepped closer to him, I quickly changed my mind. I could. not. stop laughing.
Why? Well, that pretty little bird shat on Doc!
Oh yes he did.
There was no way I was getting close to one of those birds. Especially since I couldn't stand up straight from laughing so hard. A couple of guys standing around looked at Doc with pity and gave him a "Dude, that sucks." but no one came running with a paper towel or anything. So Doc stripped off his shirt and we went on our way (yes, he had on an undershirt).
Here I am standing on the edge of a nearby cliff. It wasn't too terribly high, but definitely higher than the water looks in the picture. I was actually a little nervous standing right there.
And just a little bit down the way, these guys were taking a little nappy-nap. (Sea lions or seals? I dunno.)
If you ask me, that doesn't look very comfortable unless you get to be on top. Some of those little guys are getting smooshed. They had some friends across the way that kept barking at them.
We had ice cream for dinner (what? we had a late lunch) and then hit the sack really early since we had to be up by 4 am to catch our flight home. It really wasn't that hard to get up since we knew we'd be meeting our sweet new puppy as soon as we got home.
So that was our trip. Our sunburns have peeled off and we've re-adjusted to the time difference and are slowly but surely getting used to having an 8 week old puppy. Life is good!