California Vaca Part 1 - In N Out Burger, La Jolla and Point Loma

We left Lexington on Friday after work to head up to Cincinnati to catch our flight to San Diego. One small problem though - Lexington got a freakish amount of rain earlier in the afternoon, causing a whole bunch of wrecks on the interstate, and shutting it down for several miles. Meaning that we had to take an alternate route to get to the interstate, as did the rest of rush hour traffic on a Friday, delaying us a good 30-45 minutes. Luckily, we had factored in a little bit of extra time were still able to make it to the airport on time. On the way up I realized I forgot to grab all the cash that was sitting on my dresser that we had saved up to use on this vacation, so we stopped by the ATM in Northern Kentucky, where I proceeded to get cash, but leave my debit card in the machine. Of course I didn't realized that I had left it in the machine til later that night when we were in San Diego and it was 2:00 in the morning back where I left the card. Vacation was off to a good start!

Luckily, the flight was pretty uneventful, and we got into San Diego around 10:15 pacific time. We got our rental car, got checked into our sweet hotel, and headed to In N Out Burger, which I had been told by many people that we needed to go there. It did not disappoint and we left with full, happy bellies, and headed back to the hotel to get some sleep. It was about 3:00 am where we came from and we had both worked all day.

One thing to note - we had no plans as to what we would do on this trip. We headed out to Cali with a hotel reservation in San Diego, one in Los Angeles, 2 tickets to the San Diego Zoo, 2 tickets to Disneyland and 2 tickets to see the 12:05 showing of Harry Potter 7 Part 2 at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Other than those things, everything else was up in the air, making it kind of fun.

Our first day we decided to head to La Jolla, which is a small beach town just north of San Diego. And wow was it beautiful. I'll let the pictures do the talking. {By the way, you may notice my pictures are not so amazing. Somehow I managed to lose my fancy pants DSLR camera. I'm still not sure exactly how it happened or when and where it got lost, it makes me sick to think about. Regardless, be prepared for picture overload because I can't choose just a few.}

After spending a few hours in La Jolla, we headed up the road to Torey Pines, where they had the US Open Golf Tournament a few years ago. On the way up there we went down a little road that ended at a scenic overlook where there were tons of people paragliding. Of course I left my camera in the car, and this may be my biggest regret from vacation, because the view was amazing and the paragliding looked awesome. I really wanted to do it, but it cost $150 for one person to go for 25-30 minutes, and I just couldn't justify spending that kind of money. But it would have been awesome. At the golf course, the junior world championships were going on, so we got to see some really good kids play golf. And the course was absolutely beautiful.

The glare on this picture makes it difficult to see, but it's the US Open trophy.

After La Jolla we headed back down to San Diego and decided to go to Point Loma, which offers more beautiful views. Again, I'll let the pictures do the talking.

After walking around Point Loma we headed back to the hotel to change and we went to dinner at a restaurant in Mission Beach where we watched the sunset and walked around and checked the place out. Funny story of the night, there were some people on skateboards hanging around and one guy in particular looked like he was sizing up the rail on a set of stairs. Actually it was 2 sets of steps and 2 rails back to back. Derek told me to stop because he wanted to watch this. The guy turned around and walked back our direction and Derek asked him if he was going to try it. The guy said that he has been formulating a plan to do it for a while but that he was too stoned to do it that night. At least he was honest. There are definitely some free spirits out there.

So this recaps Day 1. This may take more than 4 posts, since pretty much everyday was about this full. I'll {hopefully} be back soon with a Day 2 recap.