Trust

Better hope that whale had enough sleep, because if he yawns...

I realized I had a bunch of hotel and air credits that were about to expire and ended up bopping down to San Diego for a couple of days. When I was growing up in LA I had grandparents in San Diego so I pretty much did what I did back then.

Note that I just brought my little point and shoot. You can get action pictures if you can anticipate the action - let it focus where the picture's going to be, wait for the thing to happen, press the button the rest of the way.

Anyway, we went to the Zoo, which is still awesome. Lots of very natural environments for the critters. In some ways I'm not that big on zoos (a lot of them try to keep animals they have no business keeping) but the San Diego Zoo pioneered this kind of animals-first approach.

Went to Sea World. It's changed quite a bit - used to be a sleepy little place and now they actually have rides and production values and things. I was a little skeptical that it would be worth the admission which was about twice as high as I expected but it was lots of fun.

We had a partial day before flying back to do some odds and ends. We poked around old town a bit and had lunch, then went to the Maritime Museum and the USS Midway. I remembered as a kid we'd see the Star of India (old sailing ship) and eat at the seafood place next door (Anthony's). The Star of India is now part of a collection of ships belonging to the Maritime Museum - $12 gets you on four of them, including a cold war era Russian sub. The Midway is very cool. We didn't have time to totally go through all of it, but it was still worth it. Quite similar to the USS Hornet back home - the Midway was built just a couple of years later so it's a bit bigger and more powerful but they're both so big it's not like you can really wrap your head around it anyway. Both have amazing service records over many years and if you think I'm going to compare the two you're crazy.

The highlight of that day was watching my 5'4" female traveling companion take out a wanna-be camera thief. Well, "take out" is probably a bit of an embellishment, but she was the only one who thought quickly enough to grab the guy after he grabbed some lady's camera and started sprinting away. He lost a lot of time, and I was just a bit down the path and just realizing something was up (duh) but now had time to jump in. Luckily he thought fast, made like it was a joke and gave the camera back. Good thing too - I would have only needed to delay him for a couple of more seconds before the lady's 6'6" husband caught up and pounded him into the dirt.