California highlights

We had a great week in San Diego. The weather was great -- hotter than I thought it would be but cooler than here and fabulous at night. We ate lunch and dinner outside almost every day. We had a few days all together and then Tory was at a meeting so I took the kids around town a few days. We managed to cover a lot of ground: Sea World, Aircraft carrier, beach, playground, pool time, maritime museum, zoo, model train museum, La Jolla, Balboa park.

The highlights:

Sea World -- Andrew got picked to be in the dolphin show. He fed "Duncan" the dolphin, and made him wave and jump, met the trainers and introduced himself on stage. He did a great job and loved it. Tory went up on stage with him and Emily and I watched from the "soak zone" in the arena. For Emily the highlight was meeting Elmo. They have a big sesame street play area and she ran around and had a great time. Elmo was the first character she went up to without being scared. Maybe there is hope for a Santa visit with no tears this year?



Hard Rock Cafe -- this would be among the last places I would normally choose to eat, but when you are out of town with kids even the dinner needs to have some entertainment value and the fine dining and bar scene surrounding us was not going to work. The kids loved it. Since they were pretty entertained by the surroundings Tory and I actually ate an entire meal peacefully. Plus our server brought out little trinkets for the kids which bought us at least ten extra minutes of entertainment.

Museums -- we went to lots of museums and the aquarium. It got us all out of the hotel and around town. Andrew loved the model train museum. The zoo was really great - Koalas, pandas and polar bears - lots of animals we don't have at our zoo in Phoenix.

Emily really seemed to grow up on this trip. She is talking so much and really becoming a little girl. She talked about the things we did and just really absorbed so much. It was fun watching her.

We took tons of pictures. I'll post a few here and if you come visit us I will subject you to a few hundred more.