San Diego 2008

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

As with Rio Mar in New Orleans, I had brought one particularly nice set of clothes to use for a nice dinner out.  With a second Cubs game on the schedule, however, it was starting to look like we weren't going to have much chance at a nice dinner - so we decided to go with a nice lunch instead.  I looked at various online resources before settling on a place in downtown La Jolla - a pretty ritzy area - called the Crab Catcher.  Unlike the first two days, the weather wasn't nice - it was cloudy and most of the day it rained in a light mist.  We had been considering going to the zoo, but pushed that to Thursday and chose the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Oceanographic Institute as an indoor activity that would be fun.

Lunch was excellent (and it had better have been, at those prices).   I hemmed and hawed over the ahi tuna - the description of it was terrific, but it was listed at "market price," which turned out to be 34 dollars.  34 dollars for a single piece of fish!  You're only young once, though, and it sounded too good not to get it.  Turned out that I was right.  The tuna was seared so that it was cooked on the outside but still pretty much raw on the inside, which gave it an amazing mixed texture as I bit through cooked fish - flaky and soft - but found raw fish, with that particular texture that isn't tough but just resists the tooth ever so slightly.  It was awesome.  The nori-tamari sticky rice was also good.  Added to the crab cakes we had as an appetizer, which were great, it was a pretty strong complete meal.  It wasn't Rio Mar, but that's not gonna be topped.  After lunch we stopped by a nearby Haagen-Dazs for a Sticky Toffee Pudding sundae I had seen advertised in the window on the way over.  (Sticky Toffee Pudding - possibly the greatest ice cream flavor ever invented.  Not kidding.)  Then we went back to the car, and there was a tense moment as I accidentally went down too many levels in the parking garage elevator and saw another car where the rental should have been - fortunately there were numbers on the floor, which made me realize after a second that we were on the wrong level and prevented a heart attack.

After that little thrill ride, we headed over to Birch.

The pictures at Birch were taken with Alma's camera phone again, so they aren't as good.  This is a view of the ocean from the outside "porch" area of Birch; as you can see, it was not sunny for the only day of the trip.  People were still surfing.

It's tough to get the full effect of this California spiny lobster from this shot, but there were some huge ones out in the rock pool.  We got there just in time to see feeding of the animals in the rock pool, which wasn't quite as fun as, say, shark feeding, but seeing the huge lobsters emerging from their hidey-holes was pretty neat, especially since they were much more brightly-colored than an East Coaster like myself has come to expect.

This picture, unfortunately, can't do the moon jellies justice.  The several tanks of different jellyfish might have been the neatest things in the entire aquarium.

With anemones like this, who needs fish?

This little needle fish was pretty cool looking.  Long skinny fish are always the neatest, like the grass eels they had at Shedd Aquarium.

Some seahorses.

There were a lot of different bottom-dwelling animals at the aquarium, including this oddly-shaped shark.

A couple of smaller sharks.  The aquarium wasn't a terribly big one, so there weren't a lot of large animals or anything.  There were some neat fish and other things, but there isn't much of a comparison to be drawn between Birch and a place like the Shedd, with its whales and dolphins.  I always love aquariums, though, so I can't really complain, especially since it started to mist pretty hard within 20 minutes or so of our arrival, making us happy to be inside.

There was a section on animals that camouflage themselves.  Can you spot the octopus?   (Probably.)

Can you spot the doofus with the fish puppet on his hand?

After the aquarium, we drove back to the hotel and relaxed a little before heading out to Petco for the second time in three days.  For a quick dinner but something more unique to the West Coast, we went to L&L Hawaiian Barbecue - there's one in NYC, but otherwise nothing east of Texas.  It wasn't bad, although Alma seemed to like it more than I did.

Anyway, we headed off to Petco.  The seats were on the first base line this time and well back of the field - 37th row, in fact.  This didn't turn out terrible because we were under the overhang and so didn't get wet or have wet seats - but I can't believe these seats cost more than the awesome right-field fourth row seats.  The atmosphere was just different somehow - there were still plenty of Cubs fans around us, and still guys yelling, but something about the whole thing was just off for me.  And sure enough, the Cubs ended up losing 2-1, snapping my streak.  Let us never speak of it again.

As you can see, they were hardly bad seats.  We were looking right down on the Cubs bullpen (just down to the right of the photo) and had a good view of the ball coming off the bat of right-handed hitters especially.  But it just wasn't the same.

The starting lineups for both teams.  Maddux ended up doing a number on the Cubs.  At least it was him... I guess.

They don't exactly sell the place out.

Naturally, I had missed the Tuesday victory which was the best game of the three if you're a Cubs fan.  At least I saw them win one on the road, I guess.  Alma initially told me that I would have to smile for a picture at the end of the game - I told her I couldn't promise that, and she eventually relented, which is why there's no picture of me from the second game.  It was up to Thursday to bring the trip to an entertaining close.