A few days in San Diego: Day 1

Our mini-vacation in San Diego came about because of the MathWorks' 30-Year Celebration, three years ago. As I was trying to figure out what to do during the one half-day that was free from the company-sponsored activities, the following difficulties presented itself: there was Balboa park, with a model railroad museum, an aerospace museum, and a museum of old automobiles - now obviously, going to any of these museums without my husband would have been not only counter-intuitive, it was almost sacrilegious. I also saw a couple of submarines and an aircraft carrier along the embankment, as well as streetcar tracks... that's when I realized that I will want to come back with Alex and really have a go at this city!..

Every vacation starts with planning where to stay and where to eat. It would have seemed natural to stay in the Gaslamp Quarter (which I did get a chance to explore on my own 3 years ago), unless you knew my husband: he is not a big nightlife-and-shopping fan, and so I personally gave him about half-an-hour before he would get tired of it. So I chose Ocean Park Inn as our base: it is located directly on the beach, like this.

Our room had a king-size bed, a fridge, a coffeemaker, and a balcony (as indicated in the first photo). Here I am, having coffee on the balcony, as usual.

Our room did not face the beach, it looked onto the extension of Grand Ave. We did have a side view of the ocean (behind the lifeguard station in the photo above), but what we could mostly see (and hear, especially on weekend nights) was the three bars/nightclubs across the road, with one more around the corner. This provided for interesting people-watching opportunities, while also making it somewhat challenging to sleep between 9 pm and 2 am, so if you are a light sleeper, you might want to consider getting a room with a full ocean view, they are quieter.

Initially, our vacation was supposed to happen in October, but then we had to reschedule for February, for reasons I won't go into here. I was slightly nervous about the usefulness of a beachfront hotel in February, but I needn't have been. Even with the weather in mid-60's, we enjoyed walking on the beach, as well as taking full advantage of the outdoors hot tub (which we had to ourselves at this time of year).

As far as attractions go, we started at the San Diego Zoo. It is really very impressive. The highlight, of course, are the pandas. Here is one sleeping...

... and one eating.

Also the koalas. Mostly sleeping...

... but this one is awake.

Here are a couple of sloths hanging around...

... while we were watching, one of them moved and started eating something like a cucumber.

They also have tigers...

... orangutans ...

... a "maned wolf" (who is not really a wolf)...

.... some unusual birds...

... and a tufted capuchin monkey who repeated all of Alex's movements.

After the Zoo, we moved to Balboa park, next door. Honestly, I was pretty tired by then, but we did visit the Timken (which has a very nice, if small, art collection) and the model railroad museum, where we managed to prevent a transportation disaster.

See how the engine with the tender got detached from the rest of the train in the tunnel and started running away? We noticed and alerted some of the volunteers who worked there, and they managed to cut the power and reconnect the train before the next train traveling on this track crashed into it.

That completed our first day, we did the rest of the museums on a separate visit. That night, we had dinner at the Duck Dive, walking distance from our hotel. Very nice, tasty and quite affordable.

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