Midway Museum

Jensen in front of the Midway Museum.  He was a little excited :)

 

I'm the navigator or copilot or something. ;) 

Top Gun was the first movie Jensen and I watched together so I had to get a picture in front of it (also the first time he held my hand :) )

Pilot Jensen.

Jensen got in trouble and was sent to the Brig.

   

Tiny bunks

While in San Diego we went to the Midway Museum.  It was a carrier ship just after World War II.  It was really neat to see and different than I expected.  They had a head set guided tour throughout the ship and we got to see where the sailors slept, ate, worked, and even things like the dentist and doctor areas.  It's amazing how many people and different facilities along with all the planes the ship once held.

Give Thanks

 Happy Thanksgiving!  I hope you all are able to spend today with family or friends stuffing your tummies!  I'm so excited to celebrate a day dedicated to everything we're thankful for and eating lots of food! 

Today I am thankful for sweet potatoes, my husband, my mama, cranberry sauce, my church, fuzzy socks, and my kitty.

Tide Pooling!

I grew up in Kodiak Alaska, and every year in elementary school we would take a field trip to Jewel Beach and go tide pooling.  We would spend hours looking at the tide pools with their own isolated sea cities.  We would crack open muscles on the rocks and feed sea anemones, see hundreds of star fish, sea urchins, and octopuses, and collect "jewels" (sea glass) from the beach.  Even though it was almost guaranteed you would slip and scrape you knee on barnacle covered rocks, trips to Jewel Beach are some of my favorite memories of living in Kodiak.

I haven't been tide pooling since I lived In Kodiak so I was so excited to go during our vacation.  I spent quite a bit of time before we went researching the best place to go and picking the best day for Jensen and I to visit them during low tide.  We went to Point Loma near Cabrillo National Monument.  You can imagine my disappointment that even at low tide the water was too high to see any pools of water where the sea creatures live.

 

Just some slime here. 

 Nothing here.

 Too far down to see anything here.

Just me here.

 

Here's one!!!
The only sea creature I saw the whole time we were at Point Loma. :(
I spent days telling Jensen how exciting tide pooling is, so now we need to go again so I can redeem myself and Jensen can see how fun it really is.

 We also went to an old lighthouse while we were at Point Loma where we had a great view of San Diego.

Old Town

One evening during our trip we went to Old Town San Diego to eat and look at the little shops.  The food we ate was delicious!  We even had some men sing and play the guitar for us at dinner. 

These stars were beautiful!  I wish I had an extra $100 so I could take one home with me. 

Gourd art! Aren't they cute?

Just a dog and his chicken.

 In the evenings near the coast the sea mist settles over land and everything gets covered in a dense fog.  It's a little creepy but also pretty cool.  We never get fog in Utah so it was neat to see.  Although, my hair did not like it at all.  Even though the air wasn't humid, all the fog and mist in the air make my hair poof and frizz. 

Balboa Park

Another stop we made on our trip to San Diego was to Balboa Park.  We didn't spend much time here so we only visited on museum.  We went to the Natural History Museum because we thought Jensen and I would both enjoy that one.  (I really wanted to go to the Museum of Art and Jensen wanted to go to the Automotive Museum).  To be honest the museum was kind of disappointing.  They only cool thing was bird bones and a few skeletons from the animals from Ice Age (the movie, I'm not sure what actual era they came from). 

Even though the museum wasn't that cool, it was still fun to walk around the park. And we got to hold a parrot!

La Jolla Cove

In the evening after Jensen and I went to La Jolla Beach Rick took us to La Jolla Cove, just in time to see the sunset.
When Suzanne and I were little my mom would take us to rent a movie every so often.  Almost every time we got to pick the movie ourselves Suz and I would get the movie Andre.  I'm not sure why we never just bought the movie since we wanted to watch it so often.  It's no surprise that, besides Disneyland, this was by far my favorite part of our trip.  I loooved seeing the seals so close. They're so cute!  I wanted to take a baby seal home and put it in my bathtub.  He would become my best friend, just like Andre.

He looks nice, but I was afraid to get too close just in case he decided to attack.  Those chubby seals can move faster than it seems.

Happy seal.

A seal butt! Did you know they have claws on their flippers? I had no idea!

The colors in the cove were amazing!

Soooo cute!

 

La Jolla Shores

Our first day in San Diego the weather was in the 90s so Jensen and I decided to hit the beach!  The water was pretty cold so I didn't go much deeper than my ankles.  It was such a nice day for laying out on a towel and enjoying the sun.  It's been nice these past few days to be able to spend so much quality time with Jensen.  At home we're usually both so tired after a full day of work that we both zone out in front of our computers or the tv, but here we've been able to have more quality time without our electronics in the way.  

I've also been loving my new sleeping schedule since we arrived.  The first night we were here was daylight savings and we moved back an hour in this time zone.  Because of that it still feels later to us so we've been going to sleep around 10 and waking up at 6:30 (without an alarm!).  On vacation there's not much to do that early in the morning so that has given us a little time in the morning to spend together as well.  I hope when we go back to Utah I'm able to keep the early to bed early to rise schedule and not have to be forced awake by my alarm every morning.