San Diego! Samantha! Good Times! (Parts 3 & 4)
My granddaughter, Samantha, moved to San Diego just over a year ago, in August of 2018. Right before she moved...days before...she finally started dating the woman she had been crushing on for more than two years, Susan. Almost simultaneously Susan also moved to the West Coast, to Oakland, California. Coincedence? Plan? I don't know and am not about to ask. But, if their moves were planned, why move 500 miles apart? Closer would be more convenient for their almost-every-weekend get-togethers. Sometimes they meet in San Francisco, sometimes in San Diego. Sometimes I think they use what must be massive amounts of airline miles to meet in a vacation spot: Mosier, OR; Santa Clara, CA; White Salmon, OR; or Portland, OR.
Only once in this past year have they gone together to New Brunswick, NJ, to visit Susan's family, then to Philadelphia, PA, to visit Sam's. They spent one night in my apartment, the only time I met Susan. So I was delighted when Sam told me that Susan would be coming to stay with her, arriving on the Friday night of my visit, and that she would stay through until Monday. Sam would be at work Monday, but Susan is some sort of an IT geek, and she would be working remotely from Sam's apartment. That plan spelled success for me. Certainly I missed Samantha and looked forward to seeing her, but I was happy that Susan would be there, too. I wanted very much to get to know her better.
We four were in agreement that we all wanted to spend Saturday in La Jolla. This was my fourth trip to San Diego, and I had never gotten there. Neither had Pam, although she too had been to San Diego more than once before. Samantha and Susan said that their favorite taco place was in La Jolla and that they would pick us up Saturday morning. In fact it was a little after noon before they pulled up in front of our bungalow in Sam's little red convertible. We inserted ourselves into her Ford...because I am aged and infirm, I got to sit in the front seat...and took off, flying along the highways. I found that a little scary, knowing there was no roof over my head!
Because of the usual problems finding parking everywhere around San Diego, we gave up and paid to park in a lot nearby The Taco Stand. It turned out that we were not the only people in the San Diego area who liked The Taco Stand. There was quite a long, very slow moving line. As the only aged and infirm member of our party, I was delegated to sit at one of the four narrow tables out front of the taco place. This was not the courtesy you might think it was. Only one of the tables had an opening for one person: me. My job was to spread out and dominate the whole table once the two original occupants left. Fortunately Californians are generally polite, kind people. Nobody even gave me the side eye as me and my cane and my purse tried to take over more space than one person could honestly claim.
It took the better part of an hour before my companions came back with our tacos and their trimmings, but it was worth the wait.
Susan, Samantha, and me. Pam took the picture.
I had a shrimp taco and a grouper taco. The grouper taco was tasty but had a tendency to fall apart. No complaints at all about the shrimp taco: it was delicious. The shrimp were done perfectly.
After our tacos, we left the car in the lot and poked around La Jolla, looking in shops but not buying. I felt much better than I had the day before: I was almost pain-free. We covered much less territory than Pam and I walked both Thursday and Friday...especially Thursday...and I was much more comfortable. At some point, we turned off the main drag and walked down a very steep street to the seaside...
...where Sam photo-bombed Pam. (Tsk, tsk, Samantha.)
Pam enjoying the peceful view while some of us (i.e., me) take a much needed break from the strenuous business of window shopping.
While we were in the earliest stages of planning this trip, Samantha had stipulated that she and Susan wanted to have dinner Saturday night on their own. Pam and I instantly agreed: a perfectly reasonable request. So after Sam and Susan dropped us off, Pam consulted her cell phone, we discussed the choices, and decided to try a restaurant called The InsideOUT. What an excellent decision that was!
I loved everything about the restaurant, from the name to the amazing decor...it was built around a lovely, open interior courtyard...to the clientele ("Date Night at the InsideOUT!")...but, most importantly...the food! It rivaled what we had a Cafe 21 our first day.
We started off with cocktails. (I think this was my first cocktail of 2019.) Mine was whiskey-based, with citrusy additions...sort of a variation on a whiskey sour. I forget what Pam's concoction was, but it sure was purty.
We opted for small plates for our main course.
.
I feel strongly that no meal is complete without dessert. Pam disagrees, but she did allow herself to share after I asked for two spoons. What we did agree on, as we walked out, was that the meal had been a high point of our trip.
Sunday was our last day in San Diego, but because Pam had booked us onto a red eye flight home, it was a full day. We didn't have to be at the airport until 8:30-ish. We decided to free up our day by packing up and checking out of the bungalow...which was technically ours until 11:59 p.m....before meeting our girls for breakfast on Coronado Island. (By the way, Coronado is not an island; it's really a peninsula. The main (only?) access is by the huge, beautiful San Diego-Coronado Bridge, which makes it officially (but inaccurately) an island. Got that?)
Starting the day at Breakfast Republic.
The other three went the traditional egg-sausage-bacon-toast route, but I'm not crazy about eggs for breakfast. (So sue me!) I went the granola-with-fresh-fruit-and-yogurt route and, because the other three thought that wouldn't be enough, a piece of cinnamon coffee cake. They were wrong. My granola-plus combination was large...as were their plates...and as much as I could eat:
The square white bowl contains my granola and fruit, swimming in the liquidy version of yogurt that came with. The cinnamon coffee cake is on the square white plate. It is decorated with two slices of strawberries. I ate about two bites, just to get a taste of it; the rest went back to the kitchen. No one else had room for it either.
After breakfast we went for a walk along Coroanado's cliffs that overlook the ocean.
I loved this tough little tree, clinging to the cliff and fighting the wind...
...as well as sheltering this flowering plant:
We also saw some wildlife, primarily pelicans...
Had I been a better wildlife photographer, I might have caught a shot of a seal sliding off one of the rocks off-shore, but I'm not so I didn't.
Opps, another kind of wildlife!
This is the promontory our girls climbed down to for a photo op. Sam admitted that she found climbing down a little scary. I think Susan has more rock-climbing experience than she does.
And this is why they climbed down.
By the time we left the cliff walk, we were, of course, hungry again. GPS and Google were our friends, and they found us an area abounding in gelato stalls. Our selection criteria? Which one was closest.
Once again, my cane and I are holding the fort while Pam (in the bright blue shoes), Samantha, and Susan stand in line.
We bummed around Coronado together for another hour or two, playing a game Pam invented. We found for sale signs on houses, gave Pam the address, and she looked it up on line. We found out that even a 645 sq. ft. house (100 sq. ft. smaller than my apartment) on a lot only barely larger than its footprint cost more than any of us could afford; definitely in the $1,000,000 neighborhood. Pam and I agreed that after we won the lottery, we would definitely start looking seriously for a place there. We'll have to start playing first, though.
Finally, a glowing sunset signaled that it was time for Pam and I to head to the airport.
I had had a wonderful four days...Pam is a great travel companion and organizer...she made sure we had an amazing number of experiences within a short period while still having time to relax and soak up the atmosphere. For me, though, this was the main reason the trip was a success:
Only once in this past year have they gone together to New Brunswick, NJ, to visit Susan's family, then to Philadelphia, PA, to visit Sam's. They spent one night in my apartment, the only time I met Susan. So I was delighted when Sam told me that Susan would be coming to stay with her, arriving on the Friday night of my visit, and that she would stay through until Monday. Sam would be at work Monday, but Susan is some sort of an IT geek, and she would be working remotely from Sam's apartment. That plan spelled success for me. Certainly I missed Samantha and looked forward to seeing her, but I was happy that Susan would be there, too. I wanted very much to get to know her better.
We four were in agreement that we all wanted to spend Saturday in La Jolla. This was my fourth trip to San Diego, and I had never gotten there. Neither had Pam, although she too had been to San Diego more than once before. Samantha and Susan said that their favorite taco place was in La Jolla and that they would pick us up Saturday morning. In fact it was a little after noon before they pulled up in front of our bungalow in Sam's little red convertible. We inserted ourselves into her Ford...because I am aged and infirm, I got to sit in the front seat...and took off, flying along the highways. I found that a little scary, knowing there was no roof over my head!
Because of the usual problems finding parking everywhere around San Diego, we gave up and paid to park in a lot nearby The Taco Stand. It turned out that we were not the only people in the San Diego area who liked The Taco Stand. There was quite a long, very slow moving line. As the only aged and infirm member of our party, I was delegated to sit at one of the four narrow tables out front of the taco place. This was not the courtesy you might think it was. Only one of the tables had an opening for one person: me. My job was to spread out and dominate the whole table once the two original occupants left. Fortunately Californians are generally polite, kind people. Nobody even gave me the side eye as me and my cane and my purse tried to take over more space than one person could honestly claim.
It took the better part of an hour before my companions came back with our tacos and their trimmings, but it was worth the wait.
Susan, Samantha, and me. Pam took the picture.
I had a shrimp taco and a grouper taco. The grouper taco was tasty but had a tendency to fall apart. No complaints at all about the shrimp taco: it was delicious. The shrimp were done perfectly.
After our tacos, we left the car in the lot and poked around La Jolla, looking in shops but not buying. I felt much better than I had the day before: I was almost pain-free. We covered much less territory than Pam and I walked both Thursday and Friday...especially Thursday...and I was much more comfortable. At some point, we turned off the main drag and walked down a very steep street to the seaside...
...where Sam photo-bombed Pam. (Tsk, tsk, Samantha.)
Pam enjoying the peceful view while some of us (i.e., me) take a much needed break from the strenuous business of window shopping.
While we were in the earliest stages of planning this trip, Samantha had stipulated that she and Susan wanted to have dinner Saturday night on their own. Pam and I instantly agreed: a perfectly reasonable request. So after Sam and Susan dropped us off, Pam consulted her cell phone, we discussed the choices, and decided to try a restaurant called The InsideOUT. What an excellent decision that was!
I loved everything about the restaurant, from the name to the amazing decor...it was built around a lovely, open interior courtyard...to the clientele ("Date Night at the InsideOUT!")...but, most importantly...the food! It rivaled what we had a Cafe 21 our first day.
We started off with cocktails. (I think this was my first cocktail of 2019.) Mine was whiskey-based, with citrusy additions...sort of a variation on a whiskey sour. I forget what Pam's concoction was, but it sure was purty.
We opted for small plates for our main course.
.
I feel strongly that no meal is complete without dessert. Pam disagrees, but she did allow herself to share after I asked for two spoons. What we did agree on, as we walked out, was that the meal had been a high point of our trip.
Sunday was our last day in San Diego, but because Pam had booked us onto a red eye flight home, it was a full day. We didn't have to be at the airport until 8:30-ish. We decided to free up our day by packing up and checking out of the bungalow...which was technically ours until 11:59 p.m....before meeting our girls for breakfast on Coronado Island. (By the way, Coronado is not an island; it's really a peninsula. The main (only?) access is by the huge, beautiful San Diego-Coronado Bridge, which makes it officially (but inaccurately) an island. Got that?)
Starting the day at Breakfast Republic.
The other three went the traditional egg-sausage-bacon-toast route, but I'm not crazy about eggs for breakfast. (So sue me!) I went the granola-with-fresh-fruit-and-yogurt route and, because the other three thought that wouldn't be enough, a piece of cinnamon coffee cake. They were wrong. My granola-plus combination was large...as were their plates...and as much as I could eat:
The square white bowl contains my granola and fruit, swimming in the liquidy version of yogurt that came with. The cinnamon coffee cake is on the square white plate. It is decorated with two slices of strawberries. I ate about two bites, just to get a taste of it; the rest went back to the kitchen. No one else had room for it either.
After breakfast we went for a walk along Coroanado's cliffs that overlook the ocean.
I loved this tough little tree, clinging to the cliff and fighting the wind...
...as well as sheltering this flowering plant:
We also saw some wildlife, primarily pelicans...
Had I been a better wildlife photographer, I might have caught a shot of a seal sliding off one of the rocks off-shore, but I'm not so I didn't.
Opps, another kind of wildlife!
This is the promontory our girls climbed down to for a photo op. Sam admitted that she found climbing down a little scary. I think Susan has more rock-climbing experience than she does.
And this is why they climbed down.
By the time we left the cliff walk, we were, of course, hungry again. GPS and Google were our friends, and they found us an area abounding in gelato stalls. Our selection criteria? Which one was closest.
Once again, my cane and I are holding the fort while Pam (in the bright blue shoes), Samantha, and Susan stand in line.
We bummed around Coronado together for another hour or two, playing a game Pam invented. We found for sale signs on houses, gave Pam the address, and she looked it up on line. We found out that even a 645 sq. ft. house (100 sq. ft. smaller than my apartment) on a lot only barely larger than its footprint cost more than any of us could afford; definitely in the $1,000,000 neighborhood. Pam and I agreed that after we won the lottery, we would definitely start looking seriously for a place there. We'll have to start playing first, though.
Finally, a glowing sunset signaled that it was time for Pam and I to head to the airport.
I had had a wonderful four days...Pam is a great travel companion and organizer...she made sure we had an amazing number of experiences within a short period while still having time to relax and soak up the atmosphere. For me, though, this was the main reason the trip was a success: