I realized that we’re about to turn eastward on WVT, heading slowly back to the East coast. Crazy, right? As such, our brief sojourn in San Diego is our last stop near the ocean, so I wanted to soak in all that salty goodness today.

After a run along San Diego’s Embarcadero, we grabbed lunch at Bay Park Fish Co. Harrison was excited to eat an authentic fish taco in San Diego. (The authenticity is perhaps disputable, but he says that they were de-licious.)

When we had a family reunion here in 2008, I loved running and walking around the Mission Bay Park, so I made sure to hit that up today. I was shocked to see so many people in the park, enjoying a picnic, swimming, or windsurfing, on a Wednesday afternoon. I’m guessing that they’re mostly summer tourists, but maybe San Diego residents get out to enjoy the occasional mid-week fun-day.

We were not, however, content to see only the Bay. We headed over to Mission Beach to dip our toes in the Pacific Ocean, which is FREEZING.

Harrison was not thrilled about this, but he MANNED UP and walked right in.

He made it in, just barely…

 

…before posting a hasty retreat!

 

 

 

That’s okay, we got an obligatory couples face-photo on the boardwalk so you know we were there!

 

What??? TWO free Lara bar samples on the boardwalk?? SAMPLES?!? Mission beach is the best!

(I’m frowning here because Harrison wasn’t taking the picture as fast as I wanted and people were staring at me.)

Not content with just Mission beach, we headed to the swanky La Jolla area for a view of the sea lions at La Jolla cove:

You can see how gray it is in the background–the clouds blocked out all the warm sunshine, and with a breeze blowing, we were cold! I did not stick around to take photos of sea lions. Nor did we stick around long enough to feel really poor because La Jolla is for the fancy-pants rich!

For dinner, we went to Bleu Bohème to meet one of my sweetest and goofiest friends, DOROTHY! She and I took several high school classes together, but one that sticks to memory in particular was senior year Anatomy & Physiology, where we learned that eyebrows are like “eye mustaches.” Anyway, Bleu Bohème came with a glowing recommendation from Dorothy:

“Do you like French food?  (haha!)  😉  There is this cute place called “Bleu Boheme” that is super cute.”

And we concur, it IS super-cute (and tasty)! I love all the melted wax candles that look like sculptures at each table:

It was great to see Dorothy, whom we last saw in (we think) 2010! She has been out here for the past five years pursuing a PhD in Speech Pathology, and she’s hoping to finish up next year. However, she, like us, has fallen out of love with academia, so it was a dinner full of commiseration and grand expressions of empathy for how we all made the wrong life decisions. (But also, really fun!)

Grad school makes us feel like this:

Sometimes, we try to talk with our mouths full and look like this:

Dorothy, we lurf you!

And, once again, grad school, we do NOT lurf you:

We’ve crammed a lot of sightseeing and friend-seeing in our 36 hours in San Diego! Tomorrow, I’m going to take deep lungfuls of sea air to prepare me for our drive into ARIZONA. Oh lawwwwd, it’s gon’ be hot, and I am not ready for it!