San Diego

This San Diego trip, if you remember, was Rebekah's 16th birthday present.  The girl declared beach time to be her top priority so we booked a hotel right on Mission Bay and two blocks away from Mission Beach.  And boy, was that ever the perfect trip for her!  Because she was obsessed, fascinated, couldn't get enough of...those waves.  Wanted to play in them, run away from them, watch them, go on long walks past them.  We hunted for seashells, we dug for crabs, we clambered around a rock jetty, we explored the underside of the pier.  We dug our feet into the sand, we goggled at the weirdness of seaweed and we commentated (amateurishly) the skills of the scores of surfers we saw catching waves each morning.  I even went for a 4.5 mile run along the boardwalk.  And this was all just on Mission Beach.  This doesn't count all the time we spent on the bay....kayaking, stand up paddle board surfing, reading on the fabulous beach chairs at the waters edge.  Or the time spent warming back up again in the hotel hot tub!  As beautiful as San Diego is, no one informed me that this time of year is jokingly referred to as "June Gloom."  We never got rained on...but we didn't see the sun too often.  Which meant that the 68-70 degrees were decidedly chilly.  Not that it stopped us from doing everything we wanted to do.  But that hot tub was nice....just sayin'.

Ready for a picture-palooza?

 My little blue-eyed, blonde-haired California beach babe....

 

I have an awesome picture of Rebekah getting slammed by the wave that took her down.  Her hair is flying, she has a pretty intense look of shock on her face....it's hilarious!  But she refuses to let me post it.  So you get the aftermath shot...where she's looking at me with a face that says, "Holy wow...did you see that?!"

Seaweed....seriously alien looking stuff!  It would collect on the beach in big lumps.  Bryan found the stuff fascinating and spent a lot of time building those lumps into even bigger kind of forts that the incoming water wouldn't be able to breach.  Who needs sandcastles when you can build fortifications out of seaweed?? 

Our room had a private patio that opened up to a garden and duck pond.  The ducks, as you can imagine, were very used to people and waddled around and among us with ease.  This mama duck and her tiny newborns came to our patio each and every morning...often times knocking on the sliding glass door with their beaks when they realized that Rebekah would feed them the leftover rolls from her dinner the night before.

Our last morning in San Diego Rebekah and I got up extra early to walk down to Crystal Pier and back...all in all a 5 mile walk.  Not only was the walk along the beach glorious, but playing under the pier and watching the surfers from on top were also a lot of fun. 

Rebekah could be the poster girl for stand up paddle surfing.  She jumped onto that board with ease and made it look like she'd been doing it for years...rather than this being her first time.  Maybe it really is as easy as she says.  But it's been a long time since I've had that same skinny little 16 year old size body....and I'm guessing I'd be nowhere near as graceful and probably dump myself in the bay!