We had a great time in San Diego – rented a house on Pacific Beach and divided our time between the beach and the sights. The weather was a bit on the cool side – highs in the low 70s, but most days were quite sunny and lovely.  Lena and Cole did a lot of boogie boarding – the waves are just terrific at Pacific Beach, they often break twice before reaching the shore – and spotted a pod of dolphins near the shoreline.

However, before getting to San Diego we stopped off with longtime friends Jerry and Amanda and their children, Emily and Nic. We had a great time – hadn’t seen them in 10 years!  The kids helped out making some homemade pasta (which was delicious btw).

                                

 

Here’s a group photo. Emily and Nic were so great – they entertained our kids for hours.  They are such a fantastic family – so much talent and nice to the core. Don’t miss Cole’s rather amusing expression.

 

 

Los Angeles was short and sweet, so it was on to San Diego. We spent our first day at the beach but on our second day we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park which as zoos go, was quite nice. Most exhibits are rather large and the animals have a lot of area to roam.  There is a bird lagoon that was full of beautiful birds. Lena and I lucked out by chancing on a zookeeper feeding fish, so i snapped off some quick shots.  By the way, these photos are with my new pocket camera, a Sony Cyber shot TX1. It’s a great camera but has hardly any zoom. So these birds were really close (the same bird, just one with it’s crown sticking up and the other with it down):

 

          

 

We also got to see the baby elephant, born in March of 2010.  Lena absolutely loved to see him and i have to say he was really cute:

 

 

The highlight of the trip was the family caravan ride that we took part in. It’s basically a covered truck that takes about 10 people out into the ‘open area’ section of the park where the animals roam wild (that means no cages or pens), essentially. It’s only accessible through the caravan ride.  This is what the caravan looks like:

 

 

 

On the caravan ride we got to :

 

feed a giraffe

 

 

Get pecked at by an ostrich:

 

 

this is what they do before they approach: bow their heads in a sign of submission, so you won’t take them as a threat. Then they get close to the truck and start pecking like mad (although it’s kind of cute, it looks like he’s saying ‘may i have this dance?’) :

 

Get to see one of the only 7 existing White Northern Rhinos left in the world:

 

 

Here you can see how close they are:

 

And see a baby giraffe (awww):

 

 

By the way, I found feeding the giraffe to be quite repellent.  They have very long (8 inches long) tongues that are blackish in color and prehensile which basically means they can use them a bit like hands in terms of their ability to twist and grab with their tongues. Yuck!

 

We did spend a day at Legoland. Kids had a blast, Rob and I were glad when it was over. 🙂 Here’s a shot which was taken on the last ride of the day near 6:30 pm. I think we let the kids have too much sugar.

 

 

Btw, Cole is making a peace sign in this picture, not the sign of the devil, as it might appear.  He kept flashing his Nixon-esque peace sign at every photo opportunity.

 

Two days later we headed over to Balboa Park which is just beautiful! We rented a surrey which was great fun. We nearly crashed into several onlookers as we weaved around the roads. Here are some pictures to give you a rough idea of what we saw:

 

 

 

We also visited the Railroad Museum which was amazing. The layouts were HUGE and very intricate with so much fine detail. One of the layout engineers told us that it takes 20 years to complete a layout! I only took this picture because the reflection on the glass ruined the photos:

 

This layout occupied an enormous room, as did all the others. It contained multiple tracks, tunnels and bridges. Further on in the layout there were towns, farms, downtowns, roads, even beaches with surfers riding waves. Just a fantastic museum.

 

Finally we went to visit the San Deigo Mission, first built in 1769. It’s the oldest of the California missions, although it was almost completely in ruins by the early 1900s when it was built in the form it is today.  It was a bit of an archaeological effort when it was restored, and they did a great job. It looks more than 100 years old:

 

 

This mission had a small but excellent museum on some often forgotten aspects of California history.

 

Hope you enjoyed this blog post!