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Vacation: Let's Wrap This Up!

Man, I've been slacking lately. Too much socializing, not enough blogging makes David a bad person at wrapping up vacation posts!

So I'm going to wrap up my vacation write ups with a greatest hits of the rest of the trip. It really was, in many ways, the perfect David vacation. Amazing live music, a baseball game, beaches, tons of sunlight, randomness, incredible food, and a great companion for all of it in Joanne. What more could I ask for?

Here's all of the awesome, bit by bit. Randomness Highway: Some people when they go to and from places just accept roads as roads and as a means to an end. I'm often one of those people. And by often, I mean always - I'm an efficiency expert of traveling.

Joanne is...not one of those people. She stops and takes pictures of everything. She enjoys everything. She finds humor in everything. She makes me stop at...everything.

You'd think this would infuriate me and turn me into some sort of efficiency obsessed Hulk, but in reality, I loved it. Our trip back to San Diego from Coachella was a leisurely saunter, as we stopped from place to place taking random pictures that we noted that we needed to take on our drive up from San Diego originally. Sure, it made the drive way longer than it could have been. But time is meant to be spent on experiences, and lil' Miss Joanne reminded me of that. Thanks!

Eating Good in the Neighborhood: Whenever my parents go off in their yearly venture across the nation in their motorhome, I always tell them that they should make a map based around Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and stop at each and every place they come by that he's been to. Why? Because eating is awesome, especially when it comes with a side of delicious. Subscribing to that theory, I made Joanne agree to let me go to Triple D sanctioned locations in San Diego, as we stopped by HoDad's in Ocean Beach and El Indio near the airport (conveniently so!). HoDad's happened to be right on the corner of Bacon St. and it was famed for its bacon cheeseburgers - it was destiny. As I told Joanne, "this is a burger of destiny." We got to that wonderfully kitschy restaraunt, sat down, ordered a beer, fries, onion rings, and a double cheeseburger with bacon (I AM ALL THAT IS MAN!), and then got down to business. When I took a bite out of this enormous burger, all I could taste was destiny. Destiny...thy name is bacon! It was a hell of a thing, and after I wiped it out of existence in precious minutes, I paid and told the restaraunt employee that I ate it in a matter of minutes.

He was shocked.

"It's kind of what I do."

Apparently most people can't even finish it. My bad!

El Indio was less exciting, as it turned out to be a long standing but not amazing Mexican restaraunt. Sure, everything was super legit and authentic, but most everything also didn't taste that great. In fact, their vaunted corn tortillas that Fieri went on and on about were kind of flavorless. The fish tacos were solid besides that, but I'd rather go to Bear Tooth any day of the week to be honest. Their salsas were good but unimpressive in comparison to their reputation, and as Joanne said, their chips were overly hard. It wasn't a terrible experience because it was pretty cheap, but it wasn't a milestone location by any means.

Newport Pizza was however, even if it didn't make it on Triple D. This beach bum down the street from HoDad's provided a Moose's Tooth Lite menu with cool pizza names like "The Hulk" or "Ron Jeremy." Needless to say, the latter was heavy in sausage. They also played fantastic music (Joanne and I had a blast singing along to every word of Girl Talk's Feed the Animals) and they had one of my favorite beers - Avery's Maharaja IPA - along with 62 billion other varieties of beers.

I do not overstate their beer selection. Shopping: I HATE shopping. I cannot state that loudly enough. Shopping puts me into a trance like state and slowly kills me as a person.

However, I do really enjoy pawn, antique, vintage clothing, comic, and book shops, and that is pretty much all Ocean Beach and Encinitas had to offer.

I picked up a bunch of hard to find comics, Joanne picked up an antique coffee grinder, we found all kinds of random awesomeness and looked through epic postcard and record collections, and we just had a blast going to these random joints. Sure, most of their stuff was random crap. But it was ancient, second hand random crap that was often hilarious and nearly always awesome. I mean, look at the hat I'm wearing. Admittedly, no hat fits me right, but that hat REALLY doesn't fit me. C'est la vie. Beachery: Joanne and I, being from Alaska, desperately craved sunlight when we went down to California. We hit up the beaches for napping, reading, sand castle making, and lots of relaxing, and it was pretty much amazing. This type of thing was completely necessary, as I recharged my solar batteries Wall-E style during these sessions.

Plus, we got to come up with sand castles and stories behind our castle making. As you may be able to see in my picture, my castle has a moat, cannon ramparts, and an olympic sized pool in front of it with a KRAKEN! It also says "Release the Kraken!" in the sand next to it. This remains to be the only thing of merit I have taken from Clash of the Titans.

Baseball!: On our last full day, I decided I had to attend a baseball game while I was in a real city. Of course, the real city happened to feature the once lowly San Diego Padres (not to mention punchless) as they faced off against the NL West leading San Francisco Giants. It wasn't a marquee pitching matchup, but I did mange to get awesome third baseline seats on the cheap. I did have to attend by myself because of other engagements and the game was kind of a snoozer (1-0, with the Padres winning when they only had one hit), but all in all I'm glad I went. It ended up being cool because two of the top ten plays from that night's Sportscenter were featured at my game. Yeah!
Posted by David Harper at 9:58 PM Labels: Joanne, Randomness, Vacation


