San Diego - Day 3

Saturday in San Diego we went to see the USS Midway, a huge aircraft carrier that was in service from 1945 until 1992.  It opened as a museum in 2004.  I was hesitant at first to take the kids on this little excursion, thinking it wouldn't hold their interest, but I was happily wrong - we ended up staying for about 3 hours.  The kids enjoyed seeing the ship, pushing buttons and turning knobs, and checking out all of the planes and helicopters on the flight deck.  The younger four (including Sawyer) all had a turn in the flight simulator, too, and that was the highlight for them.  I believe the highlight for Ben was seeing an engine room.  He talked to the docent for quite a while and really enjoyed checking out all of the machinery.

Tiny, steep little stairways on the island tour.

Sitting in the seats of the Boss and the Mini Boss (the people who oversaw the operations on the flight deck).

Cat was excited to see a reference book by Nathaniel Bowditch,
someone she studied in school earlier this year.

  

From there we had lunch at a yummy little place just down the Embarcadero, then Andy and Amy took Sawyer back to the hotel for a nap. Our family stayed in the area a little longer to check out the Unconditional Surrender Statue just down the way.  (As it happens, George Mendonsa, the sailor believed to be in the famous V-J Day photograph this statue is based on died just a couple of days ago.  Read about him here.)

Then it was back to the hotel for some down time.  I accompanied Eliza to the pool, Ben did some work, Cat took a nap, and the boys hung out in the kids' area at the hotel.

  

We'd originally planned to go to Coronado that afternoon but since we spent longer than planned at the Midway and surrounding area, then had our down time at the hotel, we opted for Old Town in the evening instead.  The first stop was the Mormon Battalion Museum, which was really interesting and held everyone's attention very well.  The various parts of the journey to San Diego were represented with different interactive rooms that the kids even enjoyed.  We all learned something and came away with a new appreciation for the hardships those men, women, and children endured.  The kids had fun panning for (fool's) gold afterward, and we let the sweet Sister Missionaries take an old timey photo of us.  We tried to look serious so as to make it authentically old timey, but being serious is easier for some of us than others.

Then we walked around looking for a place to have dinner.  Old Town San Diego is known for great Mexican restaurants, and who would have thought that they'd all be crawling with people on a Saturday night?  We stopped and listened to a Mexican musical group for a while, and the kids danced a little, but when we heard about the hours-wait at some of the restaurants we opted for root beer floats from the root beer float and jerky shop (seriously) and had fun choosing from dozens of specialty sodas for our dessert-before-dinner.  Once it was too late for anybody to even want dinner anymore, we went back to the hotel and ordered dinner for the adults to be delivered to the room and the kids ate leftovers that we'd stashed in the fridge.  It was a good day.