Pictures from this part of the trip can be found in Gallery.

Day 12: Wednesday, Oct 7

Our goal was to be at the San Diego Zoo a little after opening at 9:00am. The zoo is only a short 10-15 minute drive from the hotel, and there was convenient free parking. It also turned out to be "free admission for kids" month during October, so there were school groups left and right. (Some of the other museums in San Diego were also offering free kids admission during October, but the details varied — the zoo's offer was the most generous, since one adult could come with any number of kids. The main limitation was that anyone with free admission didn't get access to the gondola or bus ride, which seems fair.)

The zoo has a great reputation, so we were looking forward to it. At the same time, we didn't know exactly what to expect. It's HUGE and very spread out, which wasn't too surprising. One key difference took a long time to bubble into our consciousness: all the animals live outside year-round. There's no monkey building or giraffe building. That's quite a contrast to Minnesota.

Even though it was a really hot day, we chose to walk everywhere rather than taking the guided tour on the bus. However, we did take the gondola one way across the park, which was kind of fun. Julie especially liked the hippos and also the panda exhibit, which we waited in line to see even on a Wednesday. Ken's favorite was probably the lizard and snake exhibit. We both also enjoyed the up-close view we got of some trainers with a big male elephant.

We stayed at the zoo around 6 hours, until a bit after 3:00pm. At that point, we were both hot and tired, so we headed back to the hotel and lazed around for a bit. Ken eventually took a nap.

For dinner, we walked a few blocks into Little Italy and ate at Bencotto, an Italian place that specializes in home-made pasta.

Later in the evening, we stopped at a nearby liquor store to get a bottle of wine for our friend Kerry, and then decided to go wandering in the Gaslight District — about 15-minute walk from the hotel. This place was hopping. There were so many restaurants within walking distance of our hotel that we could probably have eaten every meal at a different place every day for a month and not run out of options.

We weren't sure what to do in the Gaslight District, so we sort of just wandered around trying to decide whether to get a snack or something. On one corner, we heard music from an upstairs window and went to investigate. It turned out to be the Euphoria Brass Band performing at the Quad Alehouse. We each bought a microbrew beer and settled down to listen to the band, eventually leaving around 10:00pm.

Day 13: Thursday, Oct 8

First thing in the morning, we headed to the Maritime Museum of San Diego, which is on the waterfront just a few minutes from the hotel. The museum is a collection of real and replica watercraft. Among others, we saw a Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine, the USS Dolphin (still the deepest diving submarine in the world), the HMS Surprise (a replica tall ship used in the Master and Commander movie), and Star of India (the world's oldest active sailing ship, built in 1863 on the Isle of Man). There was so much to see that we probably could have spent the entire day (or more) there. However, we just didn't have the time.

After visiting as much of the museum as we could, we paid another $5 each to take a tour of the bay on the museum's 1914 Pilot Boat. This was well worth the cost. The tour lasted almost an hour and took us a lot of places we wouldn't have seen otherwise. We even got relatively close to the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class supercarrier docked at the Navy yard across the bay from the museum.

After the harbor tour, we walked back toward the hotel looking for lunch. Everywhere we stopped had a long line, and we were on a bit of a tight schedule because we needed to meet our friend Kerry at 2:00pm. We eventually settled on a taco stand near the hotel. However, we completely misunderstood the menu and bought something which was more of a snack.

We scarfed down the food in our hotel room, and then got in the car and headed for the Mission Bay Yacht Club to meet Kerry. The front gate let us in without even a question, and we had no problems finding Kerry. We visited with him for about an hour and got a tour of his Nor'Sea 27 sailboat, Emerald (hull #8), which he's owned since 1979.

After finishing up with Kerry, we drove north through the Mission Bay area. We were both hungry after our not-quite lunch, so we stopped a convenient Cold Stone Creamery and split a huge sundae. After that, we continued north toward Torrey Pines. Torrey Pines is a nature reserve in the cliffs above the ocean. It protects one of the country's rarest pine trees, the Torrey Pine tree.

The reserve closes at sunset, so we only had a few hours to spend there. First, we visited the historic Torrey Pines Lodge, built in 1922. Then, we hiked the Razor Point trail part-way down the cliffs. When it turned out that we had some time left, we walked down the road to the relatively flat Guy Fleming trail. Again, it was really hot. We were glad to have brought our big bottle of water, and doubly glad that we weren't one of the dozens of people we saw jogging on the trails or biking up the steep hill to the visitor center.

After looking at rush hour traffic north from our vantage point up by Torrey Pines Lodge, we decided to drive south rather than north. We got into the car and headed to Old Town San Diego, which is a state park. We did eventually run into rush hour traffic, but fortunately the drive wasn't too long. When we got to Old Town, we paid for parking (the official free lot was full) and found a public bathroom. Then, we grabbed dinner at a decent little Mexican restaurant outside the park. When we were done with dinner, we wandered around the park to see what was there.

Old Town was mostly a bust. They seem to have installed realistic "sounding" businesses in historic buildings, and combined that with some historical information scattered across the park. On the edges of the park, there's a big strip of Mexican-themed restaurants, bars, and shops (mostly of the tourist-trap variety). We arrived after dusk, so all of the historical stuff was closed. We had considered coming back the next day to look it, but eventually decided that it wasn't worth it.

After deciding that we'd seen everything we cared about, we took city streets back from Old Town to our hotel. That was kind of fun, because we saw downtown from a different angle and drove past the airport on the north side of downtown. (San Diego's airport is apparently the busiest single-runway airport in the country.)

Day 14: Friday, Oct 9

Our goal for the morning was to visit the USS Midway Museum, another floating museum. Midway is an aircraft carrier commissioned a week after the end of World War II. It was in service for 47 years.

As we walked down to the water, we were a little disheartened to see that two cruise ships (one from Carnival and one from Disney Cruise Lines) had docked overnight. We assumed this would mean crowds at the Midway Museum. When we got there, we found a long line, which we were able to skip because of the online combo pass we purchased on Thursday for the Maritime Museum. However, the ship was pretty empty inside, and guides later told us that the ship never seems crowded, even with 5000 visitors on board. In retrospect, that makes sense, considering its crew complement was around 4000, and the hanger deck is no longer full of aircraft.

We ended up liking this museum a little more than the USS Iowa museum that we saw in Long Beach. More of the ship was open to be explored, and there were more displays. The Iowa museum wasn't bad; it just felt like the Midway museum had more budget and the result was a better experience. The comparison between the two ships was pretty interesting, too. For instance, the bridge on the Iowa is heavily armored, with only small portholes to peer out of. The bridge of the Midway is big and airy. The Midway's bridge was designed to control flight operations, while the Iowa was designed to survive being fired at by other battleships. It makes for a different set of priorities.

We left the ship in the early afternoon (around 1:00pm), after getting through as much of the museum as we were interested in seeing. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at the same taco stand again, but this time we grabbed actual meals for each of us. We ate our meals back in the hotel room again, and then got the car and drove to the Cabrillo National Monument. The monument is on the grounds of a military installation, so it's only open from 9:00am to 5:00pm. Just like Torrey Pines, we had only a limited amount of time and could have used more.

The monument is on a bluff that overlooks the San Diego bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other side. The views are spectacular. There were dozens of sailboats in the water, and we even got to see a warship (probably a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser?) and a submarine (probably Los Angeles-class), entering the bay. That was pretty cool.

After wandering around the visitor center area a little, we drove down to the water on the Pacific side and walked the trails in the inter-tidal zone, down near the current Coast Guard station. The trails felt a lot like Torrey Pines, and we were again hot and sweaty.

When we finished up on the trails, we still had a little time left before the park closed, so we drove back up top and toured the historic lighthouse. This is the original lighthouse, but it was eventually closed because clouds and fog on the high banks often obscured the light. Most of the other visitors seemed to be part of a group that was planning someone's wedding at the monument.

We started heading back to our hotel a few minutes before the park closed. We missed a turn on the drive back and ended up driving randomly through some fairly hilly neighborhoods to work our way back to a main road. Eventually, we hit downtown on the coast road that runs past the airport.

Back at the hotel, we dropped off the car and then headed out to get dinner. We decided to visit another one of Elise's recommendations, a brew pub called Ballast Point Brewery, which has a location on the far side of Little Italy. At Ballast Point, you open a tab when you get there and then you order beers or food at any cash register until you want to close the tab. We both ordered beers to start with and then found a spot on the open patio (right under the landing path for the airport). A few minutes later, we ordered dinner, typical pub food. Ken ordered a double IPA that Ballast Point will only sell in 8-oz sizes (not pints). In retrospect, this makes sense, since it's 10% alcohol by volume.

We split a stout for dessert, and then went for a little walk before going back to the hotel. (Ken needed a few minutes to sober up after his double IPA.) Then, we called it an early night, since we needed to get everything packed up for our flight back home.

Day 15: Saturday, Oct 10

Overnight, we had a lot of loud noise from the room next door: morons partying in their room pre- or post-bar. When Ken called the front desk, someone came up and yelled at them, and Ken's earplugs ("never go anywhere without them!") solved most of the rest of the problem.

We were done with breakfast and ready to leave a little earlier than planned (9:30am instead of 10:00am), so we left anyway. As it turned out, that was probably a good idea. Traffic on the drive back up to LA looked pretty good initially, but slowed to a crawl about 45 miles into the drive. We were getting a little nervous, because if it continued, there was no way we would make our 3:30pm flight from LAX to MSP. However, traffic eventually cleared and we made it to the airport area in around 2.5 hours. During parts of the drive, the car thermometer read 105-107 degrees F, but we weren't sure whether to believe it.

Since we had a little extra time, we stopped in the little town of El Segundo near the airport and got lunch at a restaurant called Farm Stand. After that, we stopped at a Subway on the way out of town and grabbed sandwiches to eat on the flight for dinner. Then, we headed to the airport.

We ran into a pile of unexpected traffic right around the airport, which slowed us down. Then, literally as we were about to turn into the rental car return, Ken realized that we hadn't put gas in the car. So, we had to go searching for a gas station. We found one a few lights way, at a punishing price of over $5/gallon (almost $2 above the prevailing rate). Fortunately, we only had to put in about 6 gallons, so it was still cheaper than the penalty that Budget would have charged.

By the time we returned the car, the thermometer was reading 100 degrees F, and it felt like it. We were hot and sweaty in just the few minutes we were standing outside to get the car checked in.

After getting checked in, we took the shuttle bus back to the airport, changed into long pants for the flight home (the forecast for home was in the mid-60s F by evening) and then had an uneventful flight back to MSP. We stopped for ice cream at Cub on the drive back from the airport, and were home by around 10:00pm.