Day 22- June 10, 2006 - San Diego

I wake up to turn the air conditioner off in the morning- he always sets it before bed and I end up freezing halfway through the night. I dream, but I've lost track of the details and I realize it would have been far more productive to keep a dream journal than these daily summaries because I have dreamt more adventures at night than I've had during the day. Doug has had only nightmares.

Somewhere along the line, I fell behind in my writings and I'm sure this is the reason my entries are less than inspired. I'm sure that I've had more insights that would have been better captured had they been recorded at in the moment. I'm not sure that any of this matters anyway. It is not honest enough to be important or relevant, and I blame this, unfairly perhaps, on my lapse in writing. It is overwhelming to try to catch so many details.

We went to Seaport Village today- a shopping district along the water, which I explained to my mother in comparison to South Street Seaport, which is perhaps inaccurate since I can't remember ever having actually gone to the South Street Seaport, just reading about it in a class on consumerism.

There were flea market style booths set up with vendors selling jewelry and hand carved wooden baskets and other such things. I suspect that this is the weekend atmosphere and not the everyday, though I have no real evidence to support my suspicions and I am not particularly interested in putting in the effort to confirm or deny this guess. I went into all the stores, looking for gifts for Stacey and Erica and my sisters. But mostly, Doug wanted to people watch and an outdoor market on a Saturday is as good a spot as you can ask for.

We were followed around in the stores by the people that worked there. I didn't notice, but Doug told me after the fact. I was focused on the over-friendliness of the cashiers, thinking about how I have too much city cynicism to be able to handle this kind of perkiness on a daily basis.

I'd spotted statues on the drive down, lining the water and I wanted to get a closer look so we put more money in the meter and started walking. They were mostly water themed, presumably by local artists, since I did not recognize any of the names (though this shouldn't mean anything, since I'm not all that well versed in sculpture artists.) Half of them were interested, and we stopped to take pictures of the ones we liked best, the ones that left elaborate shadows on the pavement before them.

It was worth the walk, the weather was nice and there was plenty of opportunity for eavesdropping along the way. there was an obscene amount of pedicabs there, the drivers- they are called drivers right?- speaking a language that Doug identifies as Russian, though he has no experience with the Russian language so I imagine he must have been guessing at best. I can't imagine they get enough business down there to necessitate the volume of empty pedicab traffic, or how they can get riders when they are all clustered together, but maybe that's not the point, maybe I don't get it.

Doug stopped to take pictures of a docked pirate ship and a half naked old man walking along the pier. He's taken nearly all the pictures on the trip, with the exception of the Highway 1 scenic shots which I'm sure he would have liked to take had he not been driving.

We get back to the car with a minute left on the meter. We headed out on our way to Old Town, where we planned to go to a haunted house, but after driving through the area, Doug was not thrilled with the touristy feel of the place and the lack of parking. After doing a couple laps around, including a detour around a park where a (Spanish) wedding was taking place, we abandoned the idea. The area was packed with people and old time shops boasting the origin of California and Doug questioned the historical accuracy of this claim and it is not important enough to me to bother investigating it, though the way Doug talks, it seems that he is hoping to uncover a scandal that will have some sort of consequences for everyone involved.

We ended up going back to the hotel and relaxing for a bit, nursing our leg muscles and letting our stomachs anticipate dinner. the hotel offered a list of attractions with directions to them, one of which was the mall, so figuring that there would be restaurants there, that's where we headed.

Considering how anti-chain I am when it comes to eating out on vacation, all the spots we ate in San Diego end up being places we could eat at back home. We are just too tired to scout out the local hot spots like we'd done in the earlier stops on the trip. We ended up going to Applebee's, which is funny because I associate it as such a Long Island thing and I never go there when I'm home for just that reason. I found new reasons though, since everything was subpar and had I known that would be the case - I should have suspected though, really, shouldn't I have- I would've suggested we get pizza from one of the dozen places that shoved fliers under our hotel room door.

It wasn't that late when we got home, but there was nothing particularly good on TV worth staying up for. I fell asleep to the colors of Doug flipping through channels.