Blogging today is by Sarah with Alan's usual ramblings which today will be in a pretty blue colour
At the request of Alan's brother, Wally, our blog today starts with a complete food diary.
Breakfast - Scrambled eggs and toast. Alan had an apple juice and I had an orange juice
Zoo - A frozen Minute Maid lemonade
Afternoon - Alan had some coke and chocolate. I had water, two cookies and some chocolate
Dinner - We went to Tio Carlos mexican restaurant next to the hotel. We started with a large shrimp salad served in a huge tortilla shell with 2 types of lettuce, tomato, two different types of cheese, beans, guacamole which we scooped out and of course shrimp. There was Thousand Island dressing on the side. Alan had two beef tacos and a cheese enchilada (which was inexplicably stuffed with chicken). I had a chicken buritto and a beef taco. This was washed down by two glasses of lemonade each
Dessert - We haven't had it yet but it will be the leftover ice cream we purchased last night
PHOTOS - Also, before I start this blog properly, some people have advised us that they're unable to view the photos. We had re-uploaded them in a larger format to improve the quality. This seems to have been the problem. We have now reloaded the photos as a smaller file and hopefully everyone will now be able to view them, although the quality has suffered.
Today started with breakfast in our new hotel. It was a slight improvement on what we had been eating in Anaheim, with an offering of scrambled eggs, pancakes, cereal (although only corn flakes or fruit loops), danish, muffins and fruit. You can see above what we had.
We then took off for San Diego Zoo. We thoroughly investigated the map and knew exactly how to get there. Unfortunately we hadn't envisaged a closed road which threw our plans into disarray. We worked our way around, coming up the back of the zoo and found some free parking on the street.
Our tickets I secured before leaving Australia, entitled us to free bus transfers and skyway inside the zoo but Alan chose to let us walk everywhere. His mapping skills are brilliant and he had us back tracking and walking up one hill and back down another. San Diego zoo is built on some extremely steep terrain. I'm just trying to keep in shape during the soccer off-season.
One of our first visits was to check in with some ex pats. Again we discovered a number of the koalas awake, as we did last trip. They must still be suffering from the time difference and you never see an awake koala at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. There was a recording playing at the koala enclosure, talking about their habitat etc but we found it interesting that it said "Australians are used to seeing them in the wild". We told the Americans listening that we had a number of them in our backyard.
There were two main points of interest for both of us; the polar bears and the giant pandas. On our last trip, the panda named Bai Yun had just had her first cub a month before our visit and the panda enclosure was closed to reduce the noise. She's an old hand at birthing now, and although she gave birth to her fourth cub a month ago, the exhibition was still open. We were lucky enough to see cub no. 3, Sui Lin, awake and having lunch. They don't look real. I'm pretty sure it was just a furry robot sitting there munching on bamboo.
We spent a long time also with the polar bears. They were having a ball playing in the water and fighting with each other, although two of them seemed to think the other was pretty tasty and there were some nasty biting going on.
We returned to the hotel to have a drink and to decide what we were going to do next. After perusing the brochures in the foyer of the hotel, we found a place, Plaza Del Pasado in Old Town, San Diego. We wanted a new Mexican rug for our kitchen floor to replace the one we bought in Mexico 8 years ago without having to go back there to get it. Neither of us could think of anything worse. We examined the map again before we took off but before I knew it, Alan was off the main road and meandering up a windy road. I couldn't help but ask whether this was the back entrance to Magic Mountain. A quick u-turn at the top and we were back down again. He decided to take a left and the flukey bugger found the place. When are you going to learn that I'm a genius when it comes to knowing where I'm going woman? There were a lot of traditional Mexican wares and we saw in a window display a rug we liked. We saw the name of the shop but when we found it, they had no rugs. We asked the lady who directed us to their shop next door and a different shop across the courtyard. The shop next door had a number of rugs but they weren't very colourful. Also, they had ridiculous prices on them like US$80-$300.
Across the courtyard we found a beautiful rug for under US$30. I now have to repack my suitcase. Thankfully I left room for such items, unlike Alan's suitcase which was overflowing before we left home. That's understandable considering that Sarah's suitcase is twice the size of mine.
For dinner we decided to just wander to the Mexican restaurant next door. We weren't hopeful of the quality of the food as the place looked like a bit of a dump from the outside. However, it was lovely inside and the food was brilliant.
Well that's it for San Diego. Tomorrow morning we are off to the airport and on our way to Las Vegas.
Trivia for the day: San Diegans have a real problem understanding our Australian accents. I'm pretty sure they think we're speaking a foreign language. It must be because they're so used to dealing with Mexicans rather than English speakers.
More trivia for the day: Anyone planning on visiting San Diego should ensure that they bring a good map as they don't seem to believe in road signs down here.
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