San Diego Trip - Part 1

Elias was very excited to be in his hotel room bunk bed.

The family and I decided it was high time to take a summer vacation. We live about 6 hours from San Diego (8 hours in kid driving time) and you can never go wrong with the beach so we booked a hotel, took Sam out of school and off we went!

The drive went amazingly well for having a 3 month old baby in the car. We made a 2 hour stop over in Yuma to eat and stretch the legs, but otherwise drove straight through arriving at 10:30 at night. Elias fell asleep pretty early on into California, but he woke up with a passion when we arrived at the hotel. He had been looking forward to going the beach, staying in a hotel and being on vacation for a month and boy did it show. He was running around the hotel saying "My hotel has a TV! My hotel has a bunk bed! My hotel has a potty!" It was pretty cool.

We finally got the boy to sleep just before midnight and turned in soon afterwards. In the morning we awoke and meandered down stairs for the continental breakfast. I'm a big fan of continental breakfasts at hotels, at least when they come with make your own waffle stations. I once spent a week long vacation eating make your own waffles 6 out of the 7 days. It's not that they're better than waffles I get at home, its more like the vending machine novelty you get from them. It's neat!

Elias pushing the "sled" up a giant hill.

After a delicious breakfast we went swimming in the heated pool. My pansy Arizona boy can't handle water below 85 degrees, so at first he was very wary of going in "the cold pool". We didn't give him much choice though and soon he was swimming around with the whole family (including Eva!). It was a nice relaxing way to start the trip.

We spent the rest of the day at one of Kristin's childhood friend's houses. She lived just north of San Diego and had an awesome back yard with a giant sloping hill. Her kids are 10 and 5 and they created a dirt toboggan track on the hill to swoop down on. Elias went down a couple of times on the rocking-lizard-turned-sled and had a blast.

We had one close call when Elias ran down the hill at top speed. I was watching him come closer and closer to planting face into the dirt as his feet started to lose control, but he remained stable and managed to make it to the bottom of the slope without incident. The look on his face was pure terror. At the suggestion of our hosts I took his shoes off and he had nary another problem. I'm so happy I have a barefoot kid. His feet are way tougher than mine are or ever were. He never wears shoes unless we're going somewhere that requires them, and it shows. He ran up and down the hill and through the bushes for hours with perfect balance and poise. It made me wish I didn't have such tender feet.