San Diego, The Final Days

The final three days of my San Diego vacation were all pretty much the same so I'll combine them. There was a lot of driving with me as the navigator. I tended to read the map upside down and a couple of times headed the wrong direction. This is why I do not sign up for Amazing Race. Well, that and the fact that I'm quite overweight, out of shape and have a floppy ankle.

Anyway...Day Four started out with a trip to Old Town. It's original buildings from the beginning of San Diego which now house touristy shops and restaurants. I wasn't all that excited about it, really. A lot of other people seemed to be, though. The only place that I liked was "Ramona's Marriage Place" because it's like the Spanish-style house I've always wanted with the enclosed courtyard and wildflowers everywhere. Plus, it was just a museum, not a Mexican restaurant or junk shop.

Next we headed to Heritage Park. I thought you could tour the houses but you can't because they're Bed and Breakfast Inns. The outsides were pretty, though.

We took a lunch break at the Seaport Village which I enjoyed. Then we went over to Coronado to see the Hotel Del. The Hotel Del Coronado was one of the main reasons that I wanted to visit San Diego. I wanted to see it badly enough that I braved the Coronado Bridge to get there. It's very high and goes over the ocean and there really aren't any beams or anything to keep you from just driving over the edge. Plus, there's a bunch of suicide hotline posters all along it which made it even creepier.

I was very dissapointed with the hotel when we got there. It was surrounded by new hotels and there was construction everywhere and it just wasn't at all what I had anticipated. We decided that what I had actually wanted to do was go to the 1888 Hotel Del Coronado in 1888. Which would have been awesome but...you know... impossible. So we paid our $5 for parking like fifteen minutes in their lot and went back across the scary bridge to San Diego.

We started the 59 mile scenic drive next. It's very scenic (thus the name) and enjoyable and I recommend it to anyone taking a vacation there. It takes you through all the beach towns and past most of the major tourist attractions. There are a bunch of different stops you can take along the way be we just got out at the Point Loma Lighthouse and La Jolla.

Here's one of the views from Point Loma. It was really gorgeous and peaceful up there.



Day Five we drove up to Julian through a fire-ravaged state forest. Julian was just more old buildings turned into restaurants and bric-a-brac stores. It's very popular but we didn't stay that long. Back in San Diego we went to see the Marston House.


I wanted to tour the inside but I didn't want to wait an hour for the next tour to start so we went back to Balboa Park. We got lost looking for the Aeronautical Museum and then we finally found it and didn't want to go in so we went back to Old Town to tour the Whaley House. When we got there, though, it seemed really touristy and cheesy so we just bought a cool souvenir book from a gift shop and went back to our hotel.

As you may have guessed, vacation fatigue had set in.

The next day we checked out and headed up Old US Highway 101 on our way home. We stopped long enough for me to take a picture of the longest wooden pier on the West Coast in Oceanside.

Right outside of Oceanside is the San Luis Rey Mission. It was just pretty everywhere you looked.



Our last official vacation stop was the Pala Mission. I didn't enjoy it much because there was some sort of block party going on right in front of it. It's really hard to soak up the history of a place when all you can hear is the thump thump thump of hip hop from a couple of loudspeakers about 100 feet away.

It was still pretty, though. All of the California Missions are pretty. What's up with that?




And that was that. We enjoyed ourselves but were very happy to see the lights of Las Vegas when we got back. It's good that I like it so much here because I'm too poor to go on another vacation for ages.