Another quick
update from
San Diego, where I've been vacationing for the last 6 days. This
city is so
beautiful compared to
New York! Everything is very spread out, so we have to
drive everywhere, but the wide
freeways make it easy to get around, compared to the
insanity of
New York traffic.
The vacation so far has been a combination of sight-seeing, meeting Allison's family and friends, and just plain being lazy.
Sight-seeing: we went to Balboa Park, which is a gorgeous park with a bunch of interesting museums. We also took a harbor cruise through San Diego Bay, which had an impressive display of huge Navy ships. We went to the Gaslight District, a historic Downtown area. We visited Oldtown, which is an open-air museum with some very good restaurants. One day we drove up to Orange County (about 2-3 hours north of San Diego), to see Newport Beach (where Allison used to live) and Laguna Beach (to get a tan). We tried to make it up to Los Angeles but got lazy and turned around. We also, to our shame, played mini-golf.
Family and friends: Allison, my girlfriend, grew up in San Diego, so she knows a lot of people there. We stayed with her parents, who are totally sweet. Her father is a health fanatic and kept feeding us the most wonderful food! I also met Peter, Allison's best friend from college, and his girlfriend Palka and brother John. When we were in Orange County I met a bunch of her friends there.
Plain being lazy: hey, it was my first vacation in a long time. We lazed around quite a bit, just reading and tanning at the pool and the jacuzzi. I got a nice light tan - a huge improvement over my usual ghostly pallor. I read a good chunk of "The Deed of Paksenarrion" by Elizabeth Moon and am almost done with the first part of the trilogy.
Random craziness: we went to a San Diego Padres baseball game today, but at the end of the second inning there was an explosion. Apparently a transformer had caught fire causing a whole section of spotlights above centerfield to explode. After waiting for more than an hour, the announcer finally said the game had been suspended until the next day. Bad luck for us, because on Thursday, July 19 we take off for a few days in Las Vegas.