It all started with a question over text. One of Danelle’s college friends reached out to the group saying, I have a BOGO airline pass that I can’t use, are any of you interested. Danelle sat on the message for a few days before claiming it after nobody else wanted it. Then she told me about it and we started to see where we might go and when. It was cold outside being wintertime. Like many, our destination was somewhere warm. We started pricing destinations to see how to maximize our time off. We landed on San Diego, California.
We did lots of online research trying to decide how to spend our time there. We had several ideas of the things we wanted to do and before we knew it, it was time to head to the airport. With our bags packed, we headed to the airport. I’m not a fan of flying so I was already on edge. We got to the parking garage and there were no prices listed on the screen after scanning our credit card. This made me upset before getting to the airport. I’ll save you my ranting and say, I never want to use The Parking Spot again.
After a short shuttle ride, we were at the airport. Time for what I consider security theater. TSA will make passengers perform random acts in the name of security. After getting herded like cattle through the random checks, I had to spend a few minutes putting my belt back on and placing my personal belongings back on my person.
Now that we’re through security, I’m calming down. If you couldn’t tell, security is not my thing. My preference would have been to drive to San Diego… Anyway, after walking in the airport to get lots of steps and not be bored, it was time to board the plane. Things went great. Danelle blessed me with her window seat. I was able to look out until the clouds prevented it. It was cool to see Creve Coeur Lake iced over. I paddle a lot on this lake when its not frozen, hence it being important enough to photograph.
Eventually clouds covered the ground and my window seat provided no further advantage. We both relaxed all the way to San Diego. Flying west means we had plenty of day left when we arrived. A short taxi ride put us at our hotel for our stay. We opted to take the first two days without a car and use public transportation.
High on my todo list was visiting the USS Midway. This is a 1,001 foot aircraft carrier that last saw operations in 1992. This carrier was operational nearly 45 years in the Navy and saw several generations of technology.
Its hard to appreciate just how large this ship is. We arrived shortly after 10am when it opened and left nearly 6 hours later not having seeing all it had to offer. Its hard to comprehend that this boat had 4,000 sailors onboard during deployment. It seems extreme, but I’m sure its been well thought out.
The deck of the boat is a little over 4 acres of space. I’ll keep my feet on land and let others sail. I’m satisfied to have visited, but not sure I would go back. After several hours in the boat, all of the rooms look like the next! And even after 30 years of not sailing, it still had a smell of fuel and oil that may never go away.
Danelle wanted to rest a bit after being on our feet all day, especially since we were going out in the evening. We walked back to the hotel and got ready to meet up with some of her friends from a game she plays. I decided another walk was just what I needed. I set off for Spruce Street Suspension Bridge I read about. It was about 1.5 miles each way to get there. Along the way I enjoyed the architecture that is different than the majority of what we have back home.
On my way back to the hotel, I saw the fire department practicing a rescue using a bridge and going down to the bottom of the canyon this bridge went over. I ended up talking to a local and discussing our plans for our visit. I explained that we were going to La Jolla. Except I pronounced the J of the second name. The gentleman laughed a little at me and explained that its a “H” sound as it’s Spanish. We had a good laugh at it.
After getting back to the room, Danelle and I headed out to meet her gaming friends, Jwiggle and BabyCakes. They had chatted online for a while. Danelle made enough of a friendship that they drove over an hour each way to come and have dinner with us. We had lovely conversations and almost none of it was about the game.
Day 2, we wanted to do some activities along the coast, but north of where we were staying. We walked to the local public transportation hub and got on the train. After a while, it was a transfer to a bus and then to our destination near the beach. We were in the city of La Jolla and I learned very quickly that its an affluent area. Like any good tourist, I stopped to look in the windows of a McLaren car dealership.
If you couldn’t tell from the photo, they are fancy performance cars. I was able to scan the window sticker barcode and found one that started at $350,000 before options. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to afford one of those, or the insurance for it! No worries, they are fun to look at, but not my thing.
We followed the roads and found our way down to the beachfront. Danelle found a rocky area from the map and we were able to look in tide pools. Several had anemones in them. Nobody saw it so it doesn’t officially count, but I took a slippery fall down on the rocks. I’m fortunate that I didn’t hurt or bruise anything bad enough to disrupt our trip. I was however a bit pensive to go look at anything on the rock formations.
When we had our fill of the rocks, we walked on. The beach ended and we had to go up to the road. This wasn’t bad as it quickly lead us to our second point of interest, seal beach. I was worried we would miss the seals, but they were there just hanging out for us to view along with many other people. The seals and birds were everywhere on the beach. Normally visitors can go down to the beach, but because the seals had young pups, it was closed to visitors.
Like many other visitors there, we were transfixed at the nature in front of us. We watched a small bird run up and torment a seal pup before mom came around to get space. Then the bird would come at another angle. Eventually we got hungry and decided to go into town to get some lunch. We considered many places before settling on a restaurant with a patio. There was a wonderful view looking out onto the ocean that made it worth very penny of the cost. Okay, the photo doesn’t look like much, but it felt amazing to us!
After lunch, we were stuffed, but that didn’t stop us from walking streets until we got back to the beach again. We eventually came to another tide pool. I didn’t fall this time and we found lots of additional sea life.
Shortly after this tide pool, Danelle wanted to relax on the beach and absorb the ocean view. We were near the mushroom house and I wanted to check it out. It has a long history and is currently in disrepair. It had several people in it when I visited.
After I came out, Danelle had camp set up (unloaded her bag) and was happily resting. I decided to walk further up the beach for steps and curiosity. Ahead was Black’s Beach. It’s a large nude beach and I had never been to one before. I knew I was there when I saw a guy proudly walking down towards me with nothing on. The other benefit of this walk was scoping out how to get off the beach when we were done. I found a long paved road that the lifeguard trucks use to come down to the beach.
Eventually I came back to Danelle and reported what I had seen. I knew we had to get to the start of the nude beach to get back to our hotel. So we started walking. Somehow I urged her on and we ended up stopping and hanging out for sunset on the nude beach. I’m not quite sure what got a hold of me, but I decided to participate.
Danelle got a laugh out of me going for it. After sunset, we made the very long walk up the paved road that rises over 300 feet to get to a bus stop. There we took public transportation back to our hotel. All told I walked 12.5 miles that day with most of it on a beach!
On our way back to the hotel, we did stop for dinner. There is a pizza place called Mr. Moto Pizza. We used to call Corvin Mr. Moto and I wanted to name Sonora, Corona. So dinner with both of our kids…
Day 3 started with us renting a car. We found a place nearby and walked to it. To save money, I declined the insurance opting to use our own. Of course my insurance card was expired by about 2 weeks. I have insurance, just the card was expired. The choice was to pay $150 for their insurance or make the 20 minute round trip walk to our hotel to update the insurance card. I opted to save money and take up a little more of our time. Turns out that the full cost of the rental (I think due to a mistake) was $55. So adding the insurance would have been very expensive!
It didn’t take long and we were driving along checking out the scenery. Our goal was to get a bit out of town and hike a mountainous trail. If you had any question if San Diego was close to the Mexico border, we had to go through a checkpoint on US Soil near the boarder.
Since we had walked over 12 miles the day before, Danelle wasn’t excited about a long hike today. I found a really awesome remote place, but it was going to be a long hike. And it had an iron ranger (pay to be there station). We tried a second place that turned out to be a large shooting range. I chatted with a friendly local that recommended another safer place to hike. We followed his directions and found an interesting place to hike. We had a great time together, taking only 3 photos during the hike and 4 all day.
Day 4, our last full day in San Diego. We didn’t have anything that either of us felt we had to see before leaving. But we were not going to just sit idle all day. I was curious to see a slot canyon and I heard there was one north of where we had been. So off we went. This is just past La Jolla. Annie’s Slot Canyon was our destination inside the Nature Collective. Directions had us parking on a street in a residential neighborhood and quickly catching a walking trail. The trail was lovely and not too busy. The slot canyon part wasn’t exceptionally long, but just enough to really enjoy it.
Without the built in staircase, it would have been impossible to enjoy it the same way. After our hike, we ended up driving a bit and were on the top of the bluff that backs up to Black’s Beach from two days ago. It is an incredible view up there and there is a hang glider port. Unfortunately there were no hang gliders out to view.
For our final act of the day, we ended up on another beach. Danelle likes being on beaches to relax. I made it about 15 minutes before I couldn’t sit still. I started digging with my feet to make a lower spot for my feet to sit better. I got my hole dug and that allowed me to read a little before I got restless again. I then spent the next 45 minutes or so filling a water bottle and later a bag with water from the ocean and bringing it back to my hole in an attempt to fill it up. I never did get the hole filled or even keep water between trips, but I did walk almost .75 miles between our spot and the ocean in the process. Danelle took pity on me and we packed up our stuff and placed it in the car. Then we went back and walked on the beach for quite a distance.
On our final morning, we made it to Lucha Libre Taco Shop. Its a luchador themed restaurant. It was quite entertining. Also, the food was great!
From here it was returning the rental car and heading home. This was exactly the break we needed together.
Hogan Haake