San Diego - Days 4 & 5

I apologize for the accidental publishing of this unfinished post last week.  This is the finished post.

On Sunday morning we went to church then ate lunch in our rooms.  In the afternoon we ventured out to Balboa Park, which is a huge area with tons of attractions for all ages.  This is where the San Diego Zoo is located, plus gardens, an outdoor organ and performance area, lots of museums of all different types, event spaces, and more.  Our first stop was the Model Train Museum, which I think might actually exist as an excuse for grown men to pursue their model train hobbies (and perhaps recruit a few people too).  This was literally just an area to walk through and see model trains of various scales race through costum-built cities, farms, mountains, etc.  It was fun to see what the workers had put together.  We really liked this room that had lots of characters and even a video camera mounted on one of the engines so if you stood in the right place and looked at the monitor you could see the train's view of you as it drove by.

We stayed in Balboa Park the rest of the afternoon.  We walked around and took some pictures, rode on a (bigger) model train, and went on the carousel.  (We thought the carousel was particularly cool because it's so old - it was built in 1910 in New York, shipped to Los Angeles, spent a few years in Coronado, and has been at Balboa Park since 1922.)  Then we rounded out the experience by watching a street performer, who invited Jack to join his show.  Oh, and Jack got in a few minutes of Pokemon Go too.  That night we had dinner at Burger Lounge and dessert at Andy's new favorite funky ice cream place, Salt & Straw.

Our last day in San Diego was a Monday (MLK Day) and we were excited to finally make it to the beach!  We spent the morning on Coronado, checking out the Hotel Del Coronado (and appreciating the "Some Like it Hot" memorabilia, even finding the movie playing at the kids' favorite part, the final scene) and playing on the beach.  It was cold and windy and there were warnings posted about the ocean water being contaminated, but that didn't stop the kids from having a great time, in and out of the water.  (And nobody has grown any extra limbs, so the contamination must not have been too bad.)  We had lunch at a local place called Clayton's that we really liked, then headed back to the hotel to get our suitcases and put on warmer clothes before going to the airport.

Jack found a friend with a big shovel and they had fun "building aqueducts."

Our plane was delayed so we had extra time to play cards and hang out in the airport before arriving back to freezing temperatures and 4+ inches of snow on our frozen-shut van in Utah.  Suddenly the "cold weather" in San Diego wasn't so bad!