"You stay classy, San Diego!"

I/we spent a week in San Diego/southern California. It was my very first time in California, and I enjoyed it.

As I may have written in her before, the most stressful aspects of airplane travel for me are driving to the airport (particularly if it's Detroit Metro Airport), printing out baggage tags, making sure my boarding pass appears on my phone and my phone is properly charged, and--the icing on the cake--making it through TSA. Now, as a pretty basic middle-aged white dude, I have never had any problems, and for that I am thankful (as well as feeling bad for folks out there who find themselves unfairly profiled by TSA). Still, I find the process stressful. One of life's most exhilarating feelings is the moment I grab my bags, shoes, and other accessories off the conveyor belt and am free to explore all the delights the airport has to offer. This usually only means the closest coffee shop (I am an unapologetic Starbucks fan and always hope to see that familiar green-and-white logo) and possibly the newsstand to browse potential reading material.

The flight to San Diego was smooth. I am a bit overly excited to receive the Biscoff cookies that Delta Airlines offer on their flights. I'm sure Biscoff is available elsewhere, but the only time I ever eat them is on Delta flights. This makes it more special to receive them.

I will resist giving a blow-by-blow account of our time in San Diego. First and foremost, I was happy to finally make it to California. It only took me a half-century and change, but I made it.

Our first morning in SD, I walked over the pedestrian bridge from our hotel to the other side of the railroad tracks and highway. I took a few pictures of Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres baseball team and then ambled over to...you guessed it, Starbucks (this particular one on 5th Avenue in the Gaslamp District of the city).

Our first full day in San Diego, we went to the SD Zoo and it is just as excellent as advertised. What I didn't expect was how hilly and rolling the grounds were, as well as the lush green plants, flowers, and trees. The San Diego Zoo is as much a botanical garden as it is a zoological park.

On day two, we drove over to Coronado and spent the day. The historic Hotel del Coronado is ornate and imposing. I compare it to the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, only I must say--at the risk of losing my Michigan citizenship--that the Hotel del Coronado is ten times more beautiful. The architecture and attention to detail both inside and out is stunning. (Honestly, the last time I was in the Grand Hotel, I was turned off by how garish the interior was. It was as if the place had been remodeled in the 1980s in the neo-Victorian style popular in that decade and not updated since. Perhaps it's changed since then, but I wasn't terribly impressed. Still, the front porch of the Grand Hotel and its stunning view of the water cannot be matched even by the Hotel del Coronado. So perhaps I'm being too harsh towards the Grand Hotel).

The last highlight I'll discuss is our final full day. I did the honors of driving us from SD to La Jolla Cove, where we saw sea lions basking on the the rocky coastline of the Pacific. It was quite a sight for this Midwesterner who had never been to California. As I mentioned elsewhere, my most "California moment" (or at least "California moment" as I perceive it as a tourist) was on the drive up Highway 5 when Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" played on the radio and I saw craggy mountains to the right and left of me. 

So, the trip was a success. Sure, there was the usual few moments of tension that occur with any vacation, but most of us tend to block those out when we look back on our time spent away from home and all the fascinating and unique experiences we had. 

I hope to return to California in the not-too-distant future and would love to spend at least a few nights in the Hotel del Coronado. But until that happens, in the words of the legendary [fictional] news anchor Ron Burgundy, "You stay classy, San Diego!"