San Diego, Part 1

This year school’s starting on the 13th of August, so I decided to take Deane to San Diego for her Birthday since I’d be working on the actual date. We hadn’t been on any trips this summer, except for a few to Los Angeles. There is a very inexpensive, but clean and quiet hotel in Escondido we had stayed at in the past, the Motel Mediteran. We don’t spend a lot of time in the motel when we go on trips; just use it to sleep, so it suits us well. I highly recommend it if you’re out that way.

We packed the night before and left Sunday around 10:00 in the morning. The LA traffic wasn’t bad and we made good time. We stopped at the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Torrance to stretch our legs a bit. It’s a sort of Japanese mini-mall thing – there’s a Japanese grocery store, a good sized food court and about 10 small shops. The food is really good, but we had made sandwiches just in case there was traffic.

We left the Mitsuwa Marketplace and continued down the coast to Carlsbad.
The traffic remained light and we made good time, arriving around 1:30. There’s an area in Carlsbad near the beach that has some interesting shops, so we decided to walk around a bit as the hotel room wouldn’t be open until 3:00. We bought a bag of licorice at an English shop and Deane picked up some old postcards for a quarter each at an antique store.

We left Carlsbad around 2:30 and arrived in Escondido about a half hour later. Rested a bit and then went to the San Diego Animal Park (they’re open until 8:00 in the summer). There’s a food stand with a nice overview of the park in the Heart of Africa area. We walked out there, bought our food, and everything seemed to be going fine… until the bees came… lots of bees… And they didn’t just hover around; they landed on us and in the food (pre-packaged Southwestern Chicken Salad). Not sure what they were after, but they were really annoying. We ate, scuttling around to different areas in hopes of eluding them.

On the way back we fed the ducks in the lake. They apparently had added some catfish to compete with the ducks, and they swarmed the ducks from below. The catfish were amusing to watch, and they kept the ducks from getting too complacent.

Drove back to the hotel, stopped on the way for a Slurpee (it was hot and hadn’t had one for years). We were pretty tired, so we rested a bit and then went to bed.