Day 23- June 11, 2006 - San Diego

I watch almost the entirety of Pretty Woman while waiting for Doug to get ready. He comes out of the bathroom and pretends to sniffle at the TV. I throw a pillow at him and he goes to the sink to shave.

At breakfast Doug orders strawberry stuffed pancakes, despite expressing his distaste for strawberries a few days earlier. "There won't be that many," he insists, ignoring the photo that shows pancakes overflowing with strawberry goodness. The meal comes just like the pictures and he stares at it, then at the back of the waitress as she walks away and I am certain that he is putting a curse on her for tricking him so. He scrapes half off, and I pick them off his plate as he helps me finish the non-strawberry parts of my breakfast.

We'd scouted out the Mission Beach area the night before, mostly unintentionally, out of curiosity and lack of something more productive to do, and decided to come back the next day. It's like every other beach town, really, and this was part of my motivation for trying to hustle doug out of bed before noon. (Which didn't work of course.) Beaches on Sundays are packed, and this was no exception, especially since the weather was gorgeous- sunny and warm. We drove laps around the main street, pointing out the VW buses, the classic cars lining the side of the road, and the locals that held the same position each time we passed.

We finally got a parking spot on our third lap, and after wandering through the amusement park and several souvenir shops, we went looking for the boardwalk. I haven't found any boardwalks out west that are like the boardwalks here, or maybe I'm not looking in the right place. Instead of grainy planks of wood ten feet off the sand, we find pavement separated by a three foot concrete wall. Doug guesses that this is why there are more skaters and bike riders than we'd see back home, identifying the bicycles with big swooping handlebars as beach bikes.

I wished I'd brought my bathing suit, and I asked Doug if we could go back to the hotel to change, not expecting him to say yes, and he of course, refused, telling me that if we went back we weren't going out again, which I knew to be a lie since he would surely be hungry later and there was no food to be found in the room except for the candy cigarettes that remained from San Francisco and I was sure he'd forgotten about those.

We stayed out in the sun long enough to change color. I held the inside of my arm against the outside, pressed hard into the skin so that my fingerprints remained in the seconds after I moved my hand away. Back at the room, I filled out postcards to my family. Despite my insistance that it was silly to send out postcards the day before leaving, my mother demanded them, and I'm convinced that contained in the highlight reel of her day is the trip to the mail slot awaiting news from me.

After going out to dinner, we get back to the hotel in time for Sunday night cartoons and Pretty Woman is on again, and my pouty lip has no effect whatsoever on Doug, who insists we are absolutely not watching it. Just like every other night on the trip, I fall asleep before him, waking up briefly when he turns the lights off on our last night away.