San Diego 2008

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

On Tuesday we made our most ambitious car journey of the trip, driving 20 minutes or so up the coast to Encinitas, home of Quail Botanical Gardens.  Had I known we were going to see a Botanical Building on Monday, I might not have planned Tuesday around the Quail Gardens, but they still sounded fun and it gave us a chance to drive up and down the coast a little.  After a late breakfast/early lunch at IHOP, we took I-5 up to the Gardens and then took a walk around - by chance, Tuesdays are free admission days.  (I actually didn't know this before we got there, but it certainly worked out well.)

One of the first interesting things we saw at the Gardens was lizards running around in the wild.  This was one of them.

One of the most interesting areas of the Gardens was the Fruit section, which included these dwarf plantains.  Alma's comment: "Dwarf??"

I found it a little amusing that the area with all the palms here was also called "Palm Canyon."  It didn't seem like it could have been a total coincidence, but who knows.

This palm canyon wasn't much of a canyon, but all the different types of palms were certainly labeled much more clearly.

Back in the fruit section, as I inspect the guava bush.  Not everything grows on the kind of plant you'd expect it to grow on.

For example, here's a mango tree.  Pretty small, isn't it?

Lemon tree!

Possibly the single most interesting area was the Bamboo Forest, where there were all different kinds of bamboo, many of which provided quite a bit of shade, as these varieties did for me.

Here was some more particularly tall bamboo.

This bamboo was not just tall, but particularly thick, as you can see by how far my hand goes around it.  The neat thing is that it's not like a regular tree trunk - you knock on it and you can hear that it's hollow.  The craziest thing about bamboo is that it's actually a type of grass, except grass that grows dozens of feet into the air and thicker than my arm.  Pretty awesome plant.

The cork oak, from the Mediterranean Garden, is actually the tree from which cork is produced.  You could tell right from the bark, which had that springy quality when you pressed your finger against it.  Kind of fun.

Here I am posing with a tree that I liked the look of.  Not sure at this point what it was called, unfortunately.

This is the dragon tree, which I thought was just so interesting-looking.  These are found in the Mediterranean climate, so San Diego - which replicates that fairly well - is a good place for it.

The characteristic red sap of the dragon tree is called "dragon's blood," which you can see at the bottom of the picture.  It was used as the coloring in the varnish of the original Stradivarius violin.

Following the trip to Quail Gardens, we decided to make our way back down the coast.  Rather than just zip back down the 5 to San Diego, since we had no particular plans for the rest of the day, we decided to meander down the coast.  I had liked the name of a town I saw on the next exit south on the 5 - Cardiff-by-the-Sea - so we took the 5 as far as that, and then headed for the beach.

We drove down through the town, out towards the ocean.  There was a row of shops on an interior north-south street, then a set of railroad tracks, and then the US-101 Coastal Highway.  Beyond that was a campground, and then the beach.  After parking the car in a space on the interior street, we crossed the highway (there was a light and a crosswalk, as I imagine people wanting to get to the beach is a pretty common issue) and made our way out to the beach.

This is the sign letting people turning in from the 101 know what town they're entering.   Cardiff-by-the-Sea really embraces the British theme; as we drove into town, all the cross streets had names like Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cambridge.

A view of the Pacific Ocean from the beach, once we found our way out to it.  There is an RV campground right in front of the beach, and at first we weren't sure if we could cross through it, so we walked all the way around it and sort of snuck through a fence onto the very edge of the beach area.  This turned out to have been completely unnecessary, although beach access could certainly have been easier.

This is what the whole beach looked like - we entered just to the south of the cliffs, though we still had to clamber down a little bit.  On the way out we simply used the stairs.  The lifeguard station in the center was unmanned.

Another good look at the ocean.

The waves rolling in.  There were people surfing up and down the beach; the waves were probably good for beginning surfers because they weren't very high or rough.

Me standing on the beach, looking out at the ocean.  I felt sort of awkward at first because everyone else on the beach was dressed appropriately; I might as well have been in a tuxedo.  (Alma wasn't in a swimsuit either, of course, but she quickly took off her shoes and socks.  I resisted at first because I wasn't sure I wanted to get my feet all sandy, given how hard that stuff is to get off.)

Eventually I caved.  Alma caught me in the back of this shot working on taking my shoes and socks off (as well as awkwardly rolling up my pantlegs into makeshift clamdiggers).

And here I am walking along the beach, carrying Alma's purse and Diet Coke bottle.   I'd say it was worth it taking my shoes off; you only get so many chances to dip your toes in the ocean.  I've been in the waters of the Pacific before, in Australia, but I think that may have been the only time.

I must have looked kind of like a dope to the surfers and sunbathers, walking down the beach with my jeans rolled up, carrying my shoes.  Thank God Alma's purse isn't too girly, even if it's orange.

I think beach protocol pretty much obligates you to stand in as much water as you can without getting your clothes wet (if you're still wearing them).  I walked a little ways out, enough to let the waves lap over my shins.

There was a surprising amount of wildlife on the beach - a number of squirrels which weren't the usual squirrel that you might see in the East; they had short tails and tunneled like prairie dogs - and in this shot you can just see a pelican, although it's probably hard to tell that it's anything other than a bird.  You'll have to take my word for it; there were a whole bunch of pelicans at the beach, in fact, but they flew past pretty quickly before Alma could get a picture of them.

Eventually we came to a group of rocks and sat down for a bit; here's a look back up the beach from there.

Taking a look out at the ocean from the rocks.  I found a shell on the beach which I liked (you can just barely see it in my right hand here, I think), but I ended up forgetting it in the rental car.

After sitting on the rocks for a while, it was time to start getting the now-dry (or at least drier) sand off.  This process alone took at least ten minutes and left my hands feeling very dry.

I didn't really enjoy how dry the sand made my hands, as you can see here.

A bit of an awkward pose with Alma, since we're holding all our stuff, but nice.  She got a little bit of color at the beach, while I of course did not; I'm probably the only person in the world who can spend a week in California and come back looking like I spent the time in a cellar somewhere.  (Actually, I think I got a tiny bit of color, but the only way you could tell was to stare at the area where my shirt sleeves end.  It wasn't exactly noticeable.)

Finally, we made our way up the stairs, through the RV campground, and back out across the highway.  Before we left, Alma snapped this last picture of the ocean from the stairs.

We did get plenty more looks at the ocean, though, driving south along the 101.  Eventually the road moved inland a bit.

As we drove south along the 101, we passed through the Torrey Pines area, home to Torrey Pines Golf Course, which hosted this year's US Open.  The Open was a week from the Thursday we were there, which was probably good - traffic would likely have been a real mess if we'd been driving through on Tuesday of that week, when there would probably have been practice rounds and stuff.  We drove into La Jolla and stopped at a sushi place I had looked up; it turned out to be in a mall, but it was still pretty decent.  The tuna nigiri was melt-in-your-mouth, in particular, and I raved about it enough that we got a second order so Alma could try it.  As we finished up, it occurred to me that with Father's Day coming up, what better present for my dad - always a bit difficult to buy for, for me - than Torrey Pines gear?  It's not every day you wander through a golf course that's hosting a major golf tournament in a week.  Alma chose to hang around the mall, so I drove back up myself, found the pro shop (I was wearing jeans, but Torrey Pines is a muni course, so there was no Baltusrol-like issue with me somehow being underdressed, thank God), and picked up a polo shirt with the Torrey Pines/US Open logo, a ball marker with the logo, and scorecards for each course.

After that, I headed back into La Jolla to pick up Alma and we drove back to the hotel.  There was still some time left in the day, but we decided to just relax for the rest of the day; we made a trip to In-N-Out Burger as I'd never been to one and was curious about the experience.  The burger as I ordered it was just the bun, patty, some sort of sauce and a big slice of onion, which of course I appreciated.  Compared to McDonald's or Burger King I preferred it, but it couldn't touch Culver's.  Not bad though, and also pretty inexpensive (probably the only thing on the trip about which you could say that).  We would have a much less inexpensive meal when Wednesday rolled around.