Life in the Big City

We've been in San Diego the past two nights.  As I remarked last year (I think), this is a great, fun city.  They have done an amazing job on redevelopment and the Gaslamp district is fabulous.

This year we're staying at the Omni (not in any way because the Embassy Suites lost a bag of my clothes last year :-) 

Friday
We got into town late because of a lot of traffic.  We tried to avoid the traffic at one point and drove off the freeway but it did not help at all. We checked into our hotel and immediately headed over to the Padres-Red Sox Game.  The hotel is connected to the stadium via a bridge so it was a very easy commute.   The Red Sox were the visiting team (obviously) but were very well represented in the stands.  Crowd noise in no way communicated the nature of the game which was in no was a knock on the local Padres fans.  The Red Sox fans both seem to be everywhere and one of those team's fans that "everyone" roots for if they do not have or like their local team.

Saturday
In the morning we went over the bridge to Coronado and had lunch at the Hotel del Coronado.  After lunch we walked along the waterfront and had a great time people watching.  After that we crossed the bridge back into San Diego and walked all over the city to two bars that were recommended in our guide book (the Beach Bar at the W and the JBar).  After that it was still early so we snagged a great seat at the Altitude Sky Bar where we could watch the game (well, the infield anyway) for free!

Sunday
We started out for Mission Beach in the morning but when we got there it was so crowded, etc. that we decided to head back to Coronado Beach since we had such a great time yesterday.  Once again it was an easy drive over the bridge and we lucked into a fantastic, free parking space.  We had another great lunch on the deck overlooking the beach and spent a good time people-watching.

We were back into the city for the last third of the final Padres-Red Sox game and camped ourselves out at a table near the ballpark.   The bar got more and more and MORE rowdy as time went on (and as the Red Sox won).  We witnessed some SUPREMELY drunk fans. At one point Jay said to me "That man is going to get into a bar fight before the night is over."  And, you know what?  He just about did!  A bit later, I looked and saw two alpha males doing the chest-bump thing and one tossing beer on to the other.  If they had gotten into it we would have certainly been involved to some degree since they were so close and we had no possible exit strategy.  Fortunately their more sober friends intervened to mitigate the situation.

City Moment Two:  We were walking back to our (located in a very nice area of re-development San Diego area at around 7:30p  at night--read: nice neighborhood, broad daylight.)  We passed this man holding  open his wallet in front  of a woman.  I thought he was holding the money portion of the wallet  and the woman was saying something likre "OK, I'll just take a 5," and Jay thought he was holding his wallet open saying "See, I'm from Massachusetts!"   In either case, we both thought the encounter was very odd and we were stopped in the street trying to to process what was happening  Well, we were barely past them  when a fire department rescue team and police car zoomed up in full siren mode and stopped.   They immediately surrounded the guy and let the woman go.  Which led us to much speculation:  1. Was the woman a cop (lest the immediate--to us--police/fire response and her immediate "release".  2. Are we unknowingly staying in a red light/drug dealing district?  Who knows.

P.S.  My account of our last trip ended abruptly.  We did not have reliable internet access and then an emergency room visit impeded my ability to post.  Short wrap up:  From San Diego we headed out to Vegas.  Vegas was very hot.  We stayed two nights there.  On the second night I slipped in the bathroom, hit my head, busted an artery, bled all over their nice, nice hotel room, and ended up in the ER overnight with 6 stitches in my scalp.  Jay and I were up all night but still managed to head out the next morning for Mammoth.  I still don't know how we made it.  I felt terrible for the first couple of hours.  I perked up after that but was still so, so tired.  We drove through the most boring, barren landscape ever!  I was honestly thinking that there was no way that we would make it all the way to Mammoth but that we would find a nice place to stop when we got tired.  Nope.  There was nothing.  We ended up pulling over at rest stops to sleep with the car and A/C running (because it was so hot).  Plus I looked a sight.  They had cleaned up my face but I had so much blood in my hair that I looked like Medusa (when I was checking out of the hospital, the nurse remarked to me that I looked like I had escaped from the psych ward.  Nice.  But she was right!  It literally (not figuratively, literally) took me a week to get all of the blood out of my hair.)  Somehow we made it to Mammoth and it was deserted and really nice.  After Mammoth we had a nice drive to South Lake Tahoe where we stayed a night and then drove home on Saturday.  We almost skipped South Lake because of the fire but were assured that it would be OK and it was.  There was a bit of smoke and a lot of firetrucks but it was nice for them to see that business was good.  On the way home we impulsively stopped to see if there were still iPhones to be had and while the first at&t store we stopped at was out, we were able to walk right up to the Apple store in Sacramento and purchase one.  Score!

Comments

[Lori]

I'm so jealous that you got to see some Red Sox games!! I don't think we have tickets until September (in Baltimore). Thank goodness the MLB package started working again... though of course I haven't been able to see any games from here in Hamburg.

Glad to hear y'all are having some fun grownup time!