Or so you thought: San Diego, Pt. 7

Slide show time. The pups survive the trip back and looked their usual adorable selves in the back seat.

The bulk of the trip through CA was rainy and crappy, but at least it made for some uber spooky Roger Waters Windmills:

And cool clouds on the plains shots:

Eventually it cleared up:

Which gave us a nice view of our impenetrable border fence:

Yowsers. The rest of the trip consisted of the sort of landscape where Snoopy's brother Spike would've felt at home:

All in all, a fantastic weekend. Props to the Beck, as always. We pulled into the house about 7 or 8 and yelled to the cabbie "Yo homes, smell ya later." Just in time for an episode of the new Terminator series which stars River and is thereby inherently awesome.

(Just to avoid another post, we headed back to work on Tuesday, but I was fortunate enough to get invited to play in a scrimmage with Sprawl, the local Men's team, last night. We were a ragtag bunch of players from a bunch of different teams that will be playing in New Year's Fest this weekend - it was great to be back on the field after about a week and a half off; I even scored a couple of goals, played some defense, threw some, wahoo. Good times, and I am looking forward to a schwank weekend).

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.

My blog has turned into a boring vacation slide show: San Diego, Pt. 5

So the bar experience was crazy. There were approximately two other Pats fans in attendance, and we all noted how much the Chargers fans were grasping at small accomplishments. The bar ERUPTED every time the Chargers completed a pass or the Pats didn't. It was nutty. A couple of snaps of the general atmosphere:

As you can see, we were lucky enough to sit behind Phillip Rivers, which is cool. (Actually, that was a VERY drunk Irish guy who, unsurprisingly and fitting the stereotype nicely, no one could understand). The Chargers kept it close, but the Pats, despite craptitude by Brady, ran away with it. Huzzah, Super Bowl. Beck and I snapped this celebratory photo-booth-esque series:

The last one is actually quite nice. Beck went to grab some food after the game; I ran back to the hotel room to take the dogs o-u-t. When I got there, Sparkle greeted me with her t-shirt in her mouth. Woah! She managed to take the shirt off somehow, lack of thumbs be damned. I was thoroughly impressed. After taking the dogs out for sweet relief, I met back up with beck on the beach for sushi and pizza. Que romantica! We had our lunch, then headed back to the room for more scrabble and the unfortunate loss by the Packers. Bwah.

After another sunset stroll with the pups, Beck and I walked to a local wineshop/bistro for a delicious dinner. The place had a cool concept - you pick out your own wine from their storehouse, and they serve it to you with dinner - you essentially get the wine at cost but get to have it served to you for a $5 uncorking fee. Yummy stuff. Our waiter was sent by John Connor from the future, though, so that was somewhat strange. Still, all in all another grand evening, and a solid birthday completed.

The next morning, Beck and I eschewed a morning jog on the beach (have you noticed a pattern here?) for a leisurely stroll with the dynamic dogs. The sky was threatening, but we had a nice time on the beach with the dogs anyhoo:


And now, with digital video clarity, visual proof that my dogs are scared of the ocean... and that they secretly want to soak Beck!

Notice Beck's dubious claim at the end: "I almost died." i feel I have been unfairly chastised in the past when using this exact phrase w/r/t falling off of Camelback Mountain. I humbly submit that if "almost got wet" equates with almost dying, then "almost tumbled off a cliff" should also qualify. Just saying.

We checked out around 10 and said goodbye to Ocean Beach. Beck had read about an excellent, Centre Street Cafe style diner called "The Mission" a little bit north of us, so we grabbed all of our canines and other possessions and headed up there. TBC.

Crazy Seal Yoga: San Diego, Pt. 4

As Beck and I left the restaurant, we saw all kinds of cool rock formations along the beach, like these:


And this particularly nice vertical shot:

Beck then pointed off in the distance at the mysteriously shaped rocks:

Those are the rocks, up in the upper left hand corner on that little beach. Only they are a sort of moving variety of rocks. Huh? We move up for a closer look:

They're not rocks! They're seals! Crazy. The seals are beaching after doing some deep-sea diving and fishing; the whole exercise strongly resembles some odd yoga. Here are a few pics:


There was some seriously weird inner peace being realized here, too. Check out this closeup of the lower right hand pic. Can you do this?

No, no you can't. After our fair share of seal-gawking, we got back in the car and drove back down to the cleverly named Ocean Beach to take in the game. We were in the heart of Charger country; the streets were lined with powder blue. Taking in another step of perfection in the seat of enemy territory: exciting. We parked the prius in the neighborhood and rambled over to a pretty nice sports bar...