San Diego Etc. Extravaganza Part 1: Road Trip

On an overcast Thursday afternoon, the Millers piled into their car with half of their possessions (kids need a LOT of crap when you travel) and journeyed south to San Diego. We have mixed feelings about San Diego. On the one hand, there’s the fantastic zoo. Ever since Matt’s mom got us annual passes last year, it’s been one of our favorite mini-getaways. Well, the zoo part. Not so much the traveling part. There’s a pretty good reason why I didn’t have a driver’s license until I was 21 years old (besides the time my mom tried to teach me how to drive her stick-shift Jeep Cherokee and screamed at me until I ran into a post at the bank and gave up completely, as well as the fact the nearest DMV was down the mountain): I strongly dislike automobiles. I view them as a necessarily evil in this life. I accept them as a means to an end, but I really really don’t like driving. I don’t love being a passenger either. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been in a number of car accidents (only one of which was my fault, and even then only kind of), and that a friend died in one. I think part of it might be that because I grew up in a relatively remote mountain town we had to be in the car for a long period of time quite frequently. So when I moved to Orange County and I could go anywhere I needed within 5 minutes, I grew to resent car trips. I feel like they are a monumental waste of time.

Add to that the fact that nearly every time Matt and I have ventured south of Irvine we’ve encountered some kind of awful. Either out of control traffic, rain at Sea World, a broken radiator that necessitated blasting the heater in the middle of summer, a hotel charging us twice what we expected, a fire-alarm evacuation at the hotel, getting lost, or whatever. It just seems like San Diego has it out for us.

And, of course, there’s the 3-4 hour round trip driving.

And yet for some reason we keep ending up with compelling pulls to The Whale’s Vagina (Anchorman reference). This time it was Matt’s family, who live in northern California. We don’t get to see them very often, so when they do come down we try to soak up all the time with them that we can. Because their youngest daughter lives in San Diego, that’s where they stay when they come down for a visit. Since we had a weekend packed with activities down there, we opted to stay in a hotel instead of driving up and down every day. I still felt like a child abuser schlepping my poor toddler around and making him spend half the weekend in the carseat, but what are you going to do? At least he got to have fun at oodles of amusement parks in between drives. And at least he got plenty of sleep in the carseat. Oh wait—no; no that must have been someone else’s child. Mine doesn’t sleep anywhere but his own crib.

We arrived at our destination, Escondido (which is actually about 30 minutes north of San Diego, which was good—less driving—at least for that stretch). We had dinner then went to our hotel. We obviously got a little lost—it wouldn’t be a trip to San Diego without getting lost (honest to goodness, it’s like they actually plan the entire county to be ridiculously confusing so they can watch all the stupid tourists drive in circles on their stupid one-way streets that change names and maze of freeways). Eventually we found our hotel, though.

Quick Review of the Best Western, Escondido: The oversized rooms are actually really big and relatively nice, the complimentary continental breakfast is okay (you can make your own waffles!), and the service is crap. Our tissue box only had one tissue, and when I called to ask for a new box they said I had to come down and get it myself, which was also the case if I wanted more than the one sugar packet we were given for coffee. But Ben got them back on the last day when he threw an overtired toddler tantrum and flung his bag of goldfish all over the room. So there.

To be continued…