San Diego

A couple of weeks ago, we went on a trip to San Diego. Adrian had a trade show there for a couple of days so we all tagged along and stayed for a week. It is about a 13 hour drive from Logan to San Diego. Olsen generally does pretty well in the car especially since he has the v.reader my mom gave him last Christmas. We were more worried about Jovie, because she tends to get mad in the car. She did better than I feared. We stopped every 2-3 hours.

The weather was nice and mild in San Diego. We even wore shorts! While Adrian was busy with the show, I took the kids to the Children's Museum and Balboa Park to play. This trip was fun, because even though Adrian and I had our honeymoon in San Diego, we did things this trip that we did not do last time, mainly going to the Maritime Museum at the Embarcadero. We went on a 30 minute boat ride in the San Diego Bay and toured around 5 boats, including two submarines (Olsen's favorite). We actually did not even do the big San Diego things like the zoo or Sea World. We went to the Omaha Zoo when we did our College World Series trip so we figured that we did not need to do it again so soon. We almost did Sea World but it is so expensive, we decided to wait on that for another trip.

We stayed in Little Italy (we had not been before) the first three nights there. Every night we would walk around and ate pizza and pasta every night. After Adrian's show was over, we switched hotels to the Hilton on Mission Bay and Mission Bay Park (a 4000 acre park). Adrian found a pretty good deal on hotwire and we were able to get a free upgrade. It was a nice hotel. We had a back door to the garden area and were able to walk to the Bay, where Olsen could play in the sand. There was also a huge playground not too far of a walk away. Every evening, we would see so many people and dogs jogging and walking on the trails and a lot of different exercise groups doing bootcamp type exercises.

We went to three different beaches while we were there: Mission Beach (and had fish tacos at our favorite place Roberto's), La Jolla Shores, and Coronado Island. I love the beach in San Diego. The water is always cold, but the sand is so nice and it is not so windy that you feel like you are going to blow away like in Corpus.

On the way back, we stopped in Las Vegas. Adrian found a nice hotel right by the strip on hotwire so that we could be walking distance to the sites. Olsen has a thing for the Eiffel Tower right now, so we headed to the Eiffel Tower and rode the elevator up to the top (I just hope he doesn't think that the Eiffel Tower is in Vegas). We watched the Bellagio Fountains and the Mirage's volcano. Olsen really enjoyed all the sites and saw a lot of people dressed up as characters. His favorite part was riding all of the moving walkways, escalators, and elevators, though.

It was a fun trip! When we got back to Logan, there was snow all over the ground.



Olsen on the carousel at Seaport Village


Jovie Belle smiling as we wait for fish tacos (we ate fish tacos a lot on this trip).


At the Birch Aquarium


fun on the beach!


Olsen mops the poop deck!


I almost forgot - we had to ride this, because Olsen was so excited when he saw the train pass by when we walked around the Gas Lamp District. We purposely walked pretty far just so we could ride San Diego public transportation.


playing with sand toys in front of the Hotel Del Coronado


Olsen at the top of the Eiffel Tower (Vegas version)!