San Diego, Part 3

“Mmmmppph,” I mumbled, rolling over. “Have a nice time at your conference, honey.” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“Uh, yeah. Have a nice day exploring California without me,” he smiled.

Todd went off to his conference. I put gas in the rental car and headed for the highway. My plan for the next day and a half was to head to Los Angeles to visit with my sister who lives just outside of the city.

Because I’d never been to California I’d never seen my sister’s house, and I could not wait to get there. I drove along The 5 as the Californians call it and checked out the scenery on the way. There is a portion of the 5 that runs right along the Pacific Ocean, and the view was beautiful even though it was a gray day.

An hour and a half or so after I left I arrived in Margaret’s neighborhood. Awhile ago I had Google-stalked my sister’s address on Google Earth, but from that I could only see what her roof looked like. But looking around in her neighborhood, it was exactly what I had imagined. Margaret is a great gardener, and the shrubs and flowers in her yard were very pretty. It was great to be able to spend so much time with my sister and my niece, Maya. The last time I saw them was at or Grandmother’s funeral, in 2006.

Margaret is 14 years older than I am, and we’ve always been in different phases of life for as long as we’ve known each other. She was a teenager when I was a toddler. I was only 4 when she graduated high school, and was in third grade when she’d finished college and moved back home before setting out to live in Arizona. While I was a teenager, Margaret was in her 20s and 30s, while I was navigating through college, she was navigating through the early years of marriage—then she and my brother-in-law, Bruce, adopted Maya while I was just moving out of home and figuring out how to live on my own. Before I even became a wife, she became a mother.

The difference in life stages sometimes made our relationship a bit challenging. There were times when we couldn’t exactly relate to each other—while she was going through potty training with Maya, I was restoring my first sailboat with Todd. Even though we still live very different lives I think we’ve finally managed to strike up a connection. Which is great and I am very thankful for that.

We picked up Maya from school and ran a few errands before we set out to walk on a trail in a canyon near their house. It was a beautiful walk, and I enjoyed seeing the different kinds of trees and plants. Maya showed me some coyote and deer tracks that were made in a patch of cement, and Nickel—their puppy—chased sticks and bounded through the bush.

Nickel scaling a wall before retrieving a stick.

At the end of the hike we spotted a couple scouring the bushes near the parking lot. We approached them and they told us that they had seen a stray kitten and were trying to catch it. Margaret and I climbed into the bushes while Maya directed us to the kitten from the pavement. I heard the hiss come from the frightened kitten Margaret shouted “I got it! I got it!” She scrambled out of the brush, holding a claws-beared kitten out from herself. She wrapped it up in her fleece jacket and we brought it into the car, Maya, kitten and I in the back, and Margaret fending Nickel’s curiosity off in the front.

Margaret and the kitten, just after she rescued him from the bush.

We had dinner, and discussed what to do with the kitten. They already have two dogs and two cats and Margaret and Bruce were not keen on taking in another animal. Maya, of course, wanted to keep the kitten. What ten year old have you ever met didn’t want to keep a kitten? Heck, I am not a cat person but remember wanting to keep a stray kitten when I was 10. Of course, my mom said “No way.”

“Can we keep it?” Maya asked.

“No,” Margaret would respond firmly. And on it went.

“I’m going to name him….” Maya started.

“You’re not naming him. Be prepared for the possibility that he won’t be here when you get home from school tomorrow. We are not keeping that cat.”

Then Maya emerged from her bedroom, cradling the kitten, “He was lonely,” she said. Already, after knowing the kitten for an hour or two she knew that he was lonely. You have to love 10 year old animal lovers. I wonder if they ever did manage to find a home for the cat.

My dog-nephew, Juneau, age 17.

My other dog-nephew, Nickel, age 1.

The next day Margaret and I hung out and got caught up on each other’s lives some more. Then I set out to meet up with none other than Cece for lunch. Cece had just returned to town from her corporate sponsored drunk fest, I mean company conference. Our visit was short, way too short, because I needed to leave the city before LA’s impossible traffic kicked up and she’d been away for a few days and I didn’t want to intrude on her family reunion time. She and Mister took me to lunch at their favorite Mexican place, which was incredibly good. We laughed and joked with her youngest daughter while we ate. A wonderful time, and way too short. Thanks Cece.

I headed back to San Diego and chilled out a bit before Todd returned to the room. That night there was an event for his conference at the WaveHouse. Free food, free drink, a live band and surfing demonstrations on these giant artificial waves. I got the chance to meet some of the new friends he’d made, and Todd’s vodka and grapefruits were going down pretty easily that we had joked about having to use a luggage cart to get him back to the hotel room. The surfers did these elaborate jumps, the band played a ska-beachy kind of sound—a perfect complement to the free food and booze.

The next morning, bright and early, we returned the rental car and headed to the airport and jumped on a plane headed for reality.

San Diego, Part 2

Monday Todd rolled out of bed and checked the schedule for his conference—you know the reason why we went to San Diego—and saw that he didn’t have any sessions he needed to attend. Again we had the whole city waiting for us, and we had to decide once again what we would do.

We got into the car and headed for the San Diego Zoo. There was no way to fully prepare for the vastness of this zoo. We had seen billboards along the highways in San Diego advertising the zoo that had a fictitious character with a lion’s head and wings on it. The caption read “If it doesn’t exist, we don’t have it.” Boy was that the truth. The San Diego Zoo is an overwhelmingly large place. We spent the day walking around with our mouths hanging open. It’s been a week since I was there and I am still having difficulty putting our experience at the zoo into words. I mean, I could spout out some boring nonsense about how the animals’ habitats are beautiful, and blah blah blah. But it’s so much more than that, and I keep trying to find ways to illustrate how amazing the zoo is, and why seeing the pandas literally brought tears to my eyes—but I cannot seem to do it justice. Let me just show you the pictures instead.

Hippo grin

I wish I could have asked this gorilla what he was thinking.

This is my favorite picture from the zoo.

I could have stood there and watched the pandas all day. I could have also sat there and watched the gorillas all day. And I could have watched the hippos all day too.

After the zoo we headed over to Coronado Island. We drove around the island, trying to find a very Beej and Todd activity. We aren’t satisfied with spending an afternoon shopping and we spent the day sight seeing in the zoo—what are the other options on Coronado? We drove by the docks and saw a boat rental company and the answer came to us. We rented a power boat so we could cruise around in the bay for a little while.

We headed out of the Bay and into the ocean just so we could reach out and touch the water—I haven’t touched the Pacific Ocean since I lived in Australia, and I don’t think Todd has ever touched it at all. On our way out I noticed something sitting on the navigation buoys. I pointed it out to Todd and he steered the boat closer to it just so we could see a seal dozing on the buoy. I oohed and aahed over seeing a seal in the wild, and how much better that is than seeing one at Sea World or at the San Diego Zoo and then got back on course for the ocean again. We motored on, and saw even more seals on the next buoy, and even more on the one after that. I think at one point we had seen close to a dozen seals piled up on one of the buoys, including a few baby seals.

We motored out just beyond the point and shifted into neutral. We reached our hands over the gunnels of the boat and dipped our hands into the Pacific Ocean. I tasted the salt from the water on my hands, and touched the water again. We headed back to the dock and returned the boat, keeping our secret of bringing the rental boat out of the bay for those few moments.

We got back into the car again and headed to La Jolla to visit my cousin Anna, her husband Greg and their children Max and Sam. We did dinner with Anna while Greg cared for the boys. On the way to dinner Anna gave us a walking tour around La Jolla, and brought us to a beach where at least 70 seals were dozing on the sand just before the last bit of sunlight died out.

In keeping with my obsession with taking pictures of the underside of bridges, this is the bridge between San Diego and Coronado Island.

Here are the seals dozing on the navigation buoy.

This is Todd, just after we dipped our hands into the ocean.

San Diego, Part 1

“Hey Dad, it’s me. I just wanted to let you know that we’re at the airport and we’re heading out to San Diego for a week.”

“Really?” he asked. “You have to go to Point Loma,” he said. “Just drive until you run out of road then look at the view. If you look to the south or the west, all you can see is ocean. Then you look to the east and you can see all of San Diego and Coronado Island. Please go there, it’s great.”

He was right. We went to Point Loma first thing on Saturday morning. It was a bit hazy, but we could see all of San Diego. After that, we asked ourselves the question we always ask each other when we are traveling “Which of the 5,000 fun things are we going to do today?”

Here's a ship coming in through the haze, taken from Point Loma:

After Point Loma we hopped in the convertible and drove up the Pacific Highway for a few hours. In the excitement of being in a new town, neither of us thought to bring either of the two bottles of sunscreen I bought prior to leaving Rhode Island. We both ended up burned after the day was up.

Here's Todd in our hot ride, pre-sunburn:


We drove to a beach near Carlsbad, and waded into the ocean, we stopped in Encinitas to poke around in the shops and to get an ice cream.

These are rocks on North Ponto Beach:

Here's the view of the beaches near Carlsbad, and an inadvertent self portrait:

When we returned to San Diego we decided to check out the Cinco de Mayo celebration in Old Town. We took a taxi there, planning on taking advantage of the many margaritas being served, but I have a chip and salsa problem. Really it’s an addiction. If you put a plate in front of me I will eat and eat and eat and eat them until I make myself sick. I filled up on chips and salsa, and was too full to drink anymore. I have issued a chip and salsa moratorium in our house until I can attend a few meetings and get this addiction under control.

I don't know what this guy was doing, but it looks like he just peed in the server's station at the restaurant where we had dinner:

The Mexican food in San Diego, as you can imagine as the city borders Mexico, is spectacular. Even the crappy little roadside taco stands are gourmet compared to what you'd get here in Rhode Island. We went on a week long taco bender, and I am still recovering.

Sunday morning we woke up and asked the “Which of the 5,000 things are we going to do today?” question. We decided to rent jet skis at Mission Bay for an hour. We got on the bikes and rode through the no wake zone until we arrived at the speed zone. I gradually acclimated myself to going faster and faster until eventually I managed to ride it full throttle. I watched the speedometer climb though the 30s, then the 40s. It hovered at the high 40s, and then ticked over to 50, then 51 and finally 52 miles per hour. I strained to hold onto the bike, and felt my cheeks flap in the breeze until I released the throttle and felt the wake catch up to me as I slowed down.

We ditched our wet bathing suits in the trunk of the car and headed for Sea World. The weather began to drastically cool down, and we bought some fleece sweaters from the gift shop. We took in the Sea World attractions, but the one that amazed me the most (not that dolphins jumping into the air isn’t amazing, because really it is incredible) but the Pets Rule show was spectacular. Sea World had rescued 50 some odd dogs, cats, birds and even a pig from local shelters and trained them to do this incredible show. They had cats scaling the underside of the high wire, dogs playing jump rope, birds flying here and there—all on command. I have never seen anything like it. And I would love to say that my dog is trained to open the fridge and help himself, but sadly he came up with that one all on his own.

Here's a cat that is scaling the underside of a highwire. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen a cat do and I wonder how on earth this cat was trained to do this. It's not like you can say to a cat, "Seriously pal, trust us. You won't fall. Just hold on with your paws like this..."

If you've never seen dogs jump rope, now's your chance:

We took in a few more of the exhibits and then headed for the Shamu Rocks show after dark. It’s the usual enormous whale hijinks but it is set to music and a light show. We ended the day watching the fireworks over Sea World, contemplating the 5,000 activities we will have to choose from on the next day, and the remainder of the week.