A San Diego Christmas, Part 1

As promised, here is the story of our wonderful trip to San Diego for Christmas, split up into manageable chunks. Although Kevin's family isn't from San Diego, they have enough ties there and enough respect for sunny weather that they figured it would be a good place to meet up for a week.

So, Friday morning at way-too-early Eastern time (which is, equivalently, extremely-way-too-early Pacific time), we got on a plane, waited for the plane to de-ice, watched muted movies on the plane, and made it to San Diego all in one piece.

"So this is sunshine," we said to each other as we headed into the 60-degree weather. And suddenly I understood the appeal of living in California.

We had a few hours to kill before we could check into the hotel, so we decided to visit Torrey Pines, which I vaguely remembered from our visit there 6 years ago.

My younger brother didn't want to wait for us, but he didn't want us to worry, so he left us notes on the way.

The inscriptions from Spencer had long faded, but we replaced them with stroller grooves. At first the stroller seemed like a really good idea, especially as we were trudging from the lower parking lot up to the trails. And it did fine on the trails, for the most part.

Only problem was, I was pretty sure there was something I wanted to see down at the beach, and the longer we went the less we wanted to turn back. 

So, we took our stroller down this:

Well, it was more like this picture below, but still.

Not shown: stroller. I was probably holding it.

As we were moving our little handcart company down the hill, a pair of seasoned hikers came up to us and started to laugh. "We have been grumbling the whole time about the mountain bikers, since they're not allowed. But it turns out it was a stroller! That explains why the grooves stayed so parallel."

Other than our adventures getting a stroller down a rather steep and rocky hill and working with a mostly napless little boy, it was a really nice afternoon. Great weather, great company, great views, and great hair! (Well, not really that last one for me so much.)

Everyone we ran into on the trail was so friendly and so eager to take our picture (probably because we were super good looking after several hours on an airplane). California people struck me as rather nice in general.

So this is a cactus. All those readings of "Hop on Pop" prepared him well.

When we got back to the parking lot, Kevin saw his reflection in the car window and laughed. Then he made me take this picture to prove that he did know how to comb his hair.

And . . . that's enough pictures for today.