The Thrilling Conclusion: San Diego, Pt. 6

All good things must come to an end, but we weren't about to let San Diego go without grasping for at least one more culinary experience. We consulted our iPMM handbook for birthday celebration and noted that two weeks is the appropriate amount of time for celebration of birthdays divisible by two, three and five, so we decided to exit San Diego via a brunch spot up in the Pacific Beach / Mission Bay area. (By the way, hey San Diego: Ocean Beach? Pacific Beach? Who hit you guys with the clever stick?). The place was called "The Mission" and was pretty much an exact duplicate of Centre Street Cafe, west coast style, only a little bigger and you waited outside in balmy 55 degree weather instead of 25 degree weather. Nice! We left the pups in the car during breakfast, but we could see them from our table, so we figured that as long as we didn't see the Prius turn into one of those cartoon cat fight dust clouds we were okay. The dogs were fine, and Sparkle protected the Prius with her loudest, scariest barks; many a Californian now has all kinds of pathological enviro-friendly car / impish monster psychological associations. So it goes. We settled in and ordered coffee and french toast / pancake breakfasts. The place had a great vibe, and th ewalls were decorated with paintings by Grant Pecoff; I particularly liked this one. At some point, I decided that birthday breakfasts require milkshakes, so I ordered a Mocha Chip shake. Divine. Check it out:

I call that photo "Coveting." Unbelievably good, and Beck nailed it when she said it tasted like "Chocolate Satin with Cool Whip." Good times. And then our breakfast came, and it, too, was overwhelmingly good. If you go to San Diego, make The Mission a priority. Sooooo good, and we sadly left full of brunchy goodness. We got back to the car, and apparently Wrigley had called shotgun:

This cracked me up, so of course I tried to take another pic and instead ended up with another entry for "Coolest Pic Ever, Surrealist Genre:"

Take special note of the mocha chip to go shake in the bottom right of the frame. Seems someone's coveting turned to possession. As we started to say goodbye to San Diego, We realized that our timing was poor; if we left now, we would be hitting Phoenix at more or less exactly 5:30. And since Arizona apparently doesn't observe MLKJr. Day - ? - this would put us in the teeth of sprawly Phoenix rush hour, no good. So we decided to kill some time with more sightseeing up the beaches. We drove all around the twisty neighborhoods and eventually wound our way up to Torrey Pines State Beach near UC San Diego. Excellent - beautiful cliffside beaches without the annoying real estate. The cliffs were quite tall; here's shot straight down the side:

And here's a collection of ocean views on this rainy day:


If you look extraordinarily carefully at the bottom left picture, you can see the dorsal fin of a dolphin pretty much in the middle of the frame. We saw that guy leaping out of the water in the normal exuberant dolphin fashion. Pretty cool, even if view from half a mile away. The dogs eventually got tired of the misty rain, so we piled back in around 2 o'clock arizona time and prepared for the long trip home.