Side trip...meet credit card. Part two

So where’d we leave off, oh yeah $3200 for a better than new transmission.

We hung out with family for the next few days, we went to the beach, Mom, Dad and I toured the USS Midway aircraft carrier which is now an awesome museum. It was nice to meet Jim’s family. In case you can’t infer who, Jim is, he’s the groom. After a few days of relaxing, it was time for the wedding. Somehow, I got assigned to drive the bride to the location at which the ceremony was to take place. Let me set the scene for you, the wedding is supposed to take place at 6 pm, I was waiting with my parents for Jen to call me to come pick them up. Apparently, no one was checking traffic, except me. I kindly informed Jen by text that we had to leave NOW! Or we’d be late. 20 minutes later, it was time to pick up the bride. I glanced at the route google maps was telling me to go, and we headed off. Traffic wasn’t as bad as it seemed, but it wasn’t great. Because of this I relied on google, which decided a different route may be 2 minutes faster, so we should go a new way, google knows best. We took a nice scenic route which may or may not have made us later than we would have been. There is no way to tell now, and in the end, it was ok. It was a small ceremony, about 16 people total. They had it on the beach, it was a really nice ceremony, despite the bride being slightly fashionable late which wasn’t entirely my fault. We had a great dinner after the ceremony, during which the young adults/children somehow ended up with some free art from a shop next to the restaurant, kids these days!

We were planning on leaving on Friday, but the Explorer wasn’t going to be ready until at least the next Tuesday, so we had a few extra days. By Saturday everyone else had left except Jen and I and the bride and groom, we spent the morning together, and had a nice time. We found a slightly more reasonable hotel and moved. We spent the next 4 days doing touristy stuff around San Diego. We learned that finding parking can be a pain plus some of it is quite expensive, so we started taking public transportation, and walking. It actually worked out pretty well, occasionally we had to grab an Uber because of schedules, but not very often. Because of this we were able to return our rental car and save on hotel parking (yeah even the parking at the mid-grade hotel was $14 a day).

We spent the first day on our own down at Imperial Beach, and the Coronado area. Both were pretty cool, we walked out onto the pier at Imperial Beach and watched a dog surfing competition. It was fun to watch, then we explored the area a bit. We then picked up an Uber and went up to Hotel del Coronado, what an amazing place. It's a one of the largest wooden structures in the United States, we spent another couple hours looking around. Then it was time to go back to the hotel, and plan for the next day.

We caught the hotel shuttle down to the San Diego Zoo. I was pretty sure I had been there as a kid, but after going, I think we went to the Safari Park when I was little. Jen and I almost didn't go, because if you've seen one zoo you've seen them all. Well let me tell you, the San Diego Zoo is not your typical zoo. I'm glad we decided to go anyway. We started with the bus tour, which gives you a quick (45 min - 1 hour) tour of the park. After that we

tried to see as much stuff/animals as we could. Probably ended up seeing about 70% of it, there was just too much to see and not enough time. I even got Jen to ride the aerial tram back across the park. Check out some of the pictures we took while we were there.

Well it looks like this is going to be a three parter yay!!! Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion!