San Diego, California

We had a great time visiting my sister, Kate, in San Diego and were joined by my parents too! We were really busy and managed to squeeze a lot into a week (it went by way too fast). Kate gave us a tour of her lab and the San Diego State campus, which is beautiful! We got some great views of the city by hiking up one of the Mission Trails Park peaks and at Cabrillo National Monument, where we pretended to be explorers. 🙂  Obviously the weather in San Diego is amazing but it took us a while to grasp the concept that it’s basically like this year-round…!? We spent the rest of our time in an AirBnB in Ocean Beach, which has a chill atmosphere and cute downtown. I was also very excited to have a kitchen to cook in for the first time in weeks! And we enjoyed the beautiful sunsets over the water (a special treat for Andy) every evening.One day, we ventured to La Jolla for kayaking toward the caves and sea lions. The sea lions (first pictures) and seals (second picture) have apparently caused quite a stir with the local businesses. Yes, they smell bad. But they’re also adorable!!

Still in La Jolla, and with some Mexican food in our bellies, we rented wet suits and snorkeled off the beach. Unfortunately, the visibility was pretty poor and the sea was relatively choppy so we didn’t last long. And we visited the Birch Aquarium at Scripps. I especially LOVED the seahorse exhibit (seadragon pictured below)!! There were also some interactive exhibits that were fully taken advantage of by my family… 🙂

Kate recommended cycling the 21 mile Bayshore Bikeway loop while she went to volunteer training. It gave us a great tour of the bay, downtown San Diego and Coronado. We got to take our bikes on the ferry to Coronado to finish up the loop – and got a peak at the super fancy yachts (one especially enormous one with a helipad!) near the ferry dock. We spent a day walking around Balboa park, stopping at the botanical garden, the Japanese garden (Andy particularly loves Japanese gardens), and a bunch of little art studios.

We saw the most southwestern point of the continental US one day, border walls and all. The US side is the Tijuana Estuary State Park, where Kate volunteers doing estuary restoration work, so we got a great tour (and saw the US Border Patrol vehicles up close). The Mexican side of the beach was really busy with people and music – looked like one big Tijuana beach party.

We stocked up on fresh fish and lots of tropical fruits (yum!) at the Hillcrest Farm Market.  At the Maritime Museum we toured historic sailboats and even a Soviet submarine! There’s the Star of India, the oldest ship still sailing, and the ship used for filming Master and Commander.

Tide-pooling was one of our favorite activities, especially because Kate could tell us what everything was and point out cool things. The tide was lowest around 11 pm, so one night we went night tide-pooling under the Ocean Beach pier. We saw some sea hares, crabs, lots of anemones, lobsters of all sizes, and even an octopus! It was awesome despite having to use our headlamps to stumble around. We also went day time tide-pooling around noon at Sunset Cliffs. We didn’t see as many animals but still saw a bunch of barnacles (gooseneck barnacles pictured below), algae, some ray and shark egg cases, more sea hares and sea hare eggs! And could really see all the beautiful colors of the anemone and algae. Here’s Kate holding a big, slimy, sea hare: Of course we visited some breweries, we went to Little Italy to visit Ballast Point Brewery for lunch and beer tasting. Ballast Point was great, though I think our favorite San Diego brewery is actually the Belching Beaver in Ocean Beach.One evening during sunset, we managed to score a beach fire pit spot and had a bonfire on Ocean Beach which was awesome. And bonus, it was right next to the dog beach. Also… s’mores.While in San Diego, we ate a lot of delicious food, especially Mexican food. One of our favorites was getting tacos at Imperial Beach. They were the best tacos Andy has ever had, and only like $2 each!

Highlights of San Diego, CA

• Tide-pooling
• Playing in the Pacific Ocean
• Mexican food!
• Bicycling around the bay

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