So Cal

Wednesday (Feb 20)

Doheny State Beach is a really cool place in the daytime.  It’s in the middle of town, tucked in between the ocean and the I-5/Amtrak corridor.  Come to think of it, we will spend five of our seven nights within 200 yards of the train tracks.  Life on the California Coast, I guess.

This particular day was sparkling clear after the storm passed through but was also cold and windy.  Tyler and I went exploring.  We ended up at the mouth of San Juan Creek, where it flows out of its concrete culvert into the ocean.  We were just goofing around, stomping those little sand cliffs that form at the edge of little creeks in the sand … you know, fun for all ages of kids!  Then the ocean stole Tyler’s ball!!  I handed it to him, he fumbled the handoff, and the wind took it down the hill and into the surf and that was that!  The beach was very steep, and the waves broke very near shore, so the darned ball just bobbed up and down on the swells, and never, ever caught that foamy part of a breaking wave that would bring it back to shore.  If this had happened at the Encinitas beach, no problem.  The beach is nearly level, the (great surfing) waves break 150 yards out, and that ball wouldn’tve had a chance of escaping.   oh well…

We went to the recommended coffee place, JB’s Something or other. I liked it, but Martha most definitely did not.  They evidently did not understand the concept of a short pull for her triple iced espresso, and then they did the unforgivable, the snotty barista dropped the “this isn’t Starbucks” bomb.  Really, really not cool of them.

Then was the pleasant, relatively short drive down 1 as far as we could go on it.  Then because we had no choice, it was freeway time.  I-5 through Camp Pendleton, then 1 again through Oceanside, Carlsbad, Leucadia, Encinitas, to Cardiff and San Elijo State Beach, our home for the next two nights.  Martha and I lived here for ten years, 1981-1991.  She grew from 2 to 12 in these lovely environs, so it was a nostalgic journey.  For most of those years I worked at home and commuted up to my company – Zenographics – in Irvine every two weeks.  So the last two days have been chocked full of memories for me.  I’ve done that Laguna/Dana Point/Pendleton run many times.

We explored downtown Carlsbad in a failed attempt to find a lunch we wanted. I think mainly that no one was super hungry, so our standards were very high!  We got to to our campground 2-ish, and took occupancy of our site – woo!  We played around on the beach a little.  There’s still a lot of kelp from the storm.  Five-ish we all pile back in the van to find the Mexican restaurant Yelp recommended.  The food turned out to be great, but it wasn’t much on ambience, we we got takeout.  A campfire was in our plan for the evening, Martha had even brought s’mores fixings, but we didn’t get firewood so it didn’t quite happen.  Unlike 95% of humanity, I am not a big campfire guy, so if it was gonna happen Martha needed to be the one to make it happen and she didn’t, so there you have it. She kept the graham crackers and ate the chocolate and I came home with marshmallows that have by now turned to stone. :)

Thursday

Martha surprised me by agreeing to go Little Moore’s for breakfast! Back in the day I loved their beef teriyaki and eggs with steamed rice, an odd but very tasty breakfast.  Tohe musty, frumpy vibe were pretty much the same as 15 years ago. The servers are still hot beach bunnies, but the teriyaki was scrawnier and less tasty and way more expensive – $13 for a little spiced beef and eggs and rice? please.  But a successful piece of nostalgia nonetheless! Martha discovered an acceptable coffee place down the block.  She and the barista had a little discussion about how to do a short pull, and the results were good!

Back to camp. M went down the 90-odd stairs to the beach while me and Ty chilled in the van. I seemed to really need a nap. Ty was happy to play games on the iPad for a while, but eventually he went down the stairs to find his Mom. When they got back I got some stinkeye from Mom for letting him go alone.Deserved stinkeye I’m sure, but I was so asleep I barely remember him going.

In the afternoon we did a quickie run to Legoland.  Legoland is insanely expensive, something like $70 for an adult 1 day admission.   BUT … you can go in for one hour for free!  The dealio is that you have to plunk down the credit card for the $210 to buy our tickets, and but if you return to the ticket window within 60 minutes of the timestamp on the ticket they willdo a refund transaction for the whole amount back to you. You can’t really see the whole place in that time, but you can see a lot and get a feel for it. They are Legoland veterans, so Tyler knew exactly which ride he wanted to go on.  We got there late in the afternoon (3-ish), so the parking was also no charge. We did our quick tour and got the heck out. I quite enjoyed it.

Yelp-recommended happy hour sushi after that.  It was very tasty and we felt really good about it at the time, but both M and I had certain amounts of gastric distress that night – ugh.  Who ever heard of getting the farts from sushi?!?!  The likely culprit IMO was the spicy oyster shots.  Maybe straight-up sushi without the fancy stuff mighta been the ticket.

Friday

Back to the coffee place in Leucadia for a return engagement.  Our morning ritual has settled into this:  We go to a regular breakfast place where I have regular breakfast and she endures it, then we go to a fancy coffee place she has researched and she has some kind of fancy espresso drink – iced triple espresso (short pulls!) is the drink du jour on this trip – and possibly a gluten-free goody of some kind. This is not achievable every day.  If we reverse the order hit the coffee place first and they have acceptable pastry for me, then we are done for morning!  For better or worse, I can go well into the afternoon on coffee and a big fat almond croissant.

Then back to the beach, our beach.  Checkout is at 11am. I had the brilliant insight that we can decamp and simply drive the van outside around the corner and park on the highway by the fence, walk through the gate and be exactly were we camped for the last two days. It’s about 20 more steps to the beach, and we can park there all day, use the same bathroom, etc.

So, M and T stay on the beach and I hoof up the 90 steps back to the campground, check out at the gate and move the van. Then I hoof back down and we hang out at this perfect spot on this perfect day for much of the afternoon. Brilliant!

When we did finally leave, I insisted that we visit the San Elijo Lagoon Visitors Center, which as awesome.  They have a resident desert tortoise (Stanley), and a most excellent relief map of the watershed of the lagoon that stretches 40-50 miles inland, well past I-15 and Escondido.  It was outside and interactive  – which is to say that there is a bucket of water and a cup, and you are encouraged to dribble water whereever you want upcountry and watch it flow down the valleys, through Escondido, through the coastal mountains, to the lagoon and the sea.  Watching water flow is one of the joys of my life, so I really, really liked this simple thing, and thought it was all around awesome.

Then onward to hug the coast on our way to Campland.  Solana Beach, Del Mar, the heights of Torrey Pines Golf Course and biotech firms and UCSD, back down to La Jolla, where we had bargain fish tacos, to Pacific Beach and our beloved Campland On the Bay.  We were assigned the same “campsite”, a parking space with a picnic table for $55/night (!!).  My laptop even remembered the wifi login from two years ago.

We explored and played on the grass and shot hoops and ate at the Campland restaurant and hit the pools and hot tubs and showered in the heated bathrooms and did all those things that make Campland possibly even worth the $55/night that they charge me to park in their parking lot.

Saturday

Back to the southern end of La Jolla for coffee at Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, which turned out to be my favorite (along with the Handlebar in Santa Barbara) of all the fancy coffee places we’ve been to.

Then onward to what became a horrible traffic day, too similar to the horrible traffic day we had last time we were here.  Evidently it is a fool’s errand to try to find any place in the Sea World/Airport/Midway area if you do not know exactly where you’re going and how to get there. My simple goals were to get diesel at the station GasBuddy said was cheap, and to do a drive-by on the train station to make sure we can find it early tomorrow morning – Apple Maps and Google Maps (which both suck balls in my opinion) were not clear on this.  Achieving these simple things took about three hours for a variety of extremely frustrating reasons involving diabolical traffic patterns, traffic volume near the beach, and crappy advice and crappy performance from my usually trusty iPhone apps. Apple Maps and the new Google Maps each significantly SUCK as compared to the trusty ole Google Maps that came with previous iOS’s.

Eventually we got the diesel, found the train station (for all the good it would do us), had a restorative meal at In ‘n Out (lettuce wrap is gluten free!!), and got Martha to a beach for a while. Ocean Beach in this case.  It was the beach closest to the traffic hell-hole we were in, and I’d never been there, so why not? Well, why not is because traffic was horrible and it was ridiculously crowded on this beautiful Sunday. All those people in all those housing tracts they keep building and building and building in the interior hills head straight west on I-8, and I-8 ends at … Ocean Beach. It’s very clear in retrospect why this was a bad idea. Now I know.

Home to Campland. Mom needs a little quiet time so it’s frisbee on the grass, shooting hoops, and a little playground action for Tyler and Grandpa, while Mom gets her R&R. Then back to the van to navigate those Campland speed bumps to head out for our final evening – sunset and gluten-free pizza in La Jolla. I wanted to just hang at the campground, but Martha really wanted one more hit of La Jolla on their last night in So Cal.  So that’s what we did and I’m glad.  We had a good time…

Sunday

Turns out the train leaves at 6:05 EXACTLY.  We set the alarms for 5:20, but despite our conscientious efforts yesterday, Apple Maps f—ed me into not finding the station on the first try. Really, we should’ve set the alarms for earlier.  We did pull up at 6:04 but by the time Martha got Tyler’s shoes on the train was gone.  Trains being the odd creatures that they are though, we were able to catch up with it in Solana Beach, where it was to arrive at 6:43. That was a strange experience, blasting up I-5 at 6:30 on a Sunday morning, dawn breaking, from four to seven or eight lanes of freeway in each direction.  Usually full of cars in the daytime, but pretty much deserted now. Speed limit 65, I am pushing 75 and thinking I’m hurrying, yet about half of the few other cars out there are blasting by me like I’m a slowpoke. So I speed up to be just a little slower than the fastest car passing me, which was about 84-86 mph. We do actually make it to SB in time to catch the train. Very hurried goodbyes to Martha and Tyler, then boom!  They are gone and and we are all back on track for the Sunday we’d planned.  Them to sit on the train for 11 hours, me to return to Campland and re-organize the van back to bachelor mode for the second half of the trip.

Here I am, back at our Campland campsite/parking space, completely wired having already had a day’s worth of excitement and stress, and it’s only 7AM!! I chill myself out by cleaning and re-organizing the van top to bottom for a couple of hours … very restorative.  A little nap 9:30-ish, then over to the pools for a final soak in the hot tub and a final shower/shave before heading off into the desert. Exit Campland on the dot of the checkout time at noon. There’s an amazing amount of time on the morning that I just never see because I sleep in so routinely.

The whole day turned out to be just excellent. I’m so glad I stuck around for a day in San Diego on my own.  I was able to do the stuff I’ve wanted to do but could not do with the family, namely take long nature hikes and dawdle at exactly the places I wanted to dawdle.

I started out doing things the family did that I liked.  Back to Bird Rock Coffee for Sunday paper and coffee with the La Jolla yuppies – perfect!  Walk a block and a half back to Don Pedros for more cheap seafood tacos.  It was a between-meals time, so I lucked into the best table in the corner with the ocean view – perfect again!

Now for my fave outdoor thing to do in SD – which a seven year old wouldn’t go for – a long, most of the afternoon hike through Torrey Pines State Park.  Park at Torrey Pines Golf Course to avoid the state parking fee, walk the extra 3/4 along the driving range to the southeast edge of the park and get to it!  It’s on the bluffs with beautiful vistas of the ocean and the lagoon and the backcountry far to the east.  I stayed till almost sunset.

When I got back to the van it was pretty clear that I was not gonna make it to the lagoon for sunset, so I stopped at the northern edge of Del Mar, parked and hit the beach for the last few rays.  So it was pretty dark by the time I got to San Elijo Lagoon.  Moon-wise it is the time of my beloved waxing gibbous moon, so I went ahead and did the hike by moonlight – or should I say … a moonwalk!?!  A win-win, since I am sleeping in a parking lot tonight.

Well satisfied with my Really Big Day, it is time to hit the freeways and find my I-8 Walmart.