If you didn’t know that title referred to San Diego, California, you clearly haven’t watched (and rewatched and re-rewatched) Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and honestly, what are you even doing with your life?
My wife Amanda and I love to take a long, usually international, trip in the fall and a shorter, usually domestic, vacation in the spring. After our hectic trip to Japan in October, I wanted this San Diego sojourn to be somewhat more relaxing. I don’t know if I achieved that in full, but we did spend some quality down time.
Lord knows I try to be globally savvy, but sometimes my ignorance catches up with me in public. Our first stop was lunch at Shan Xi Magic Kitchen, which offers delicious Chinese food with a twist: namely, it includes such unexpected ingredients as cumin and okra. I asked our servers from which Chinese district this particular cuisine hailed. After several failed attempts at communication, one server finally pointed at the “Shan Xi” on her T-shirt. Did you know there’s a Shanxi province in China? I didn’t. It’s a little ways inland (i.e., west) of the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean peninsula. There’s also a Shaanxi province with two As, which is probably best known for its trove of terra cotta warrior statues. Shanxi with one A isn’t a region I knew about for any reason though, clearly, and that’s just a case of yours truly being stupid. The shame of it!
We were booked for a tour of the Gaslamp Quarter that evening, but our guide company ran into a scheduling issue and asked if we’d join its food tour of Little Italy instead. I was fine with that so long as we finished with gelato at Pappalecco, which we did. Super tasty. In fact I’d say Pappalecco can hold its own with the gelato we ate a few years ago in Actual Italy. We finished our Thursday in the hotel hot tub and crashed to get ready for an early morning.
After breakfast at Swami’s Cafe (yum), we hopped in our rental car and headed for the world-renowned, hundred-acre San Diego Zoo. Experts disagree which zoo is the world’s best, but San Diego is always in the running and for excellent reasons. It boasts any number of exotic species including giant pandas like the lazybones pictured below.
We also enjoyed the zoo’s numerous aviaries and African elephant and gorilla exhibits. We’ve never been to the global south, but it’s on our radar and we would very much like to try a photo safari on the African savannah someday soon.
The highlight of our Friday was probably the zoo’s “Animals in Action” tour, which (for a hefty upcharge) takes you behind the scenes for closer views, and sometimes direct interactions, with whichever animals are relaxed enough to handle it that day. Among other treats, we got to pet a gentle, drooly zebra and to feed both a rhino and a jostling flamboyance of flamingos. Yep, I looked it up. That’s what it’s called, a flamboyance of flamingos, and now we both know something fun.
Our animal adventures continued that evening with a sunset cruise around San Diego Bay. It had long been on my bucket list to see a dolphin on the open water, and Friday I got my wish. In fact we saw two! Our captain explained these were military dolphins who are associated with the naval base but spend much of their time swimming around on their own recognizance. John Oliver had just done a segment about military dolphins the weekend before. Apparently the U.S. Navy uses cetaceans for defensive purposes only, allegedly, but other countries train dolphins as kamikazes, which I hate. Is there any creature so majestic and wonderful we humans can’t just leave it well enough alone?
San Diego has not one but two amazing wildlife parks, so on Saturday we headed to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. This park is 18 times bigger than its mother park, so everything is quite a bit farther apart. We found both parks tough to navigate, even with the app and Google Maps, so we probably did a lot more backtracking than we should have. In any case we were beat by 3 p.m., but did we let that slow us down? Of course not! Naps won’t get anyone to La Jolla Cove! That’s a magical place where you can wade through frigid seawater mere meters from a colony (or herd, or rookery, depending on whom you ask) of seals and sea lions that cavort around like teens at a water park. It’s freaking adorable, not to mention the thousands of nesting pelicans adorning the cliffs. We sipped piña coladas and watched the golden sun set over the azure horizon.
Wrong!
We were off to La Jolla Playhouse for an excellent production of the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play Purpose. Were we dragging after that lengthy but entertaining dramedy? Yes. Was Amanda out past her bedtime? Very much so. Did that stop me from hauling her to Tacos El Gordo? It did not! It’s a credit to the tacos that my long-suffering wife grudgingly conceded they were worth the midnight excursion, especially once the Zantac kicked in. Trust me, friends, no trip to San Diego would be complete without incredible tacos, at which it excels.
We slept in, enjoyed another leisurely Jacuzzi hour, then dropped our rental car off and flew home. On Monday I completed final design edits on ROCK STARS, Volume III: Technosis before a screening of The Mandalorian and Grogu, at which we had a blast on the 49th anniversary of Star Wars‘ 1977 debut.
So that was our lovely spring vacay. Now I’m back and mostly rejuvenated, so it’s time to lean hard into the June 6 release of my climactic new novel, Technosis. I’m about to wear you plumb out with marketing about it, so brace yourself. I love my giddy space opera trilogy, and not enough of you seem to be reading it! If you’d like to get started, you can do so for free by clicking the Astrojuggernaut link above at top center. It’ll cost you nothing, nada, zippo, the big fat goose egg to download ROCK STARS, Volume I in softcopy. From there you can follow the other link to two different (not-free) versions of Volume II: Magicaleidoscope. Read fast, though, because June 6 is only 10 short days away! Remember, I’d be incredibly appreciative if you’d please review these books, whatever you happen to think of them, on Amazon and Goodreads and all the other booky places. Positive or not, your reviews really help me get the word out. In the meantime, have you been to San Diego? If so, what were your favorite sites and sights? Did its namesake whale also work for the U.S. Navy? Inquiring minds do want to know.
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