San Diego Day 2

Roy had a lot of work to do, so I had planned to keep the kids and myself busy all day.  In the morning, we took a walk to see the sculpture we had spotted the day before that was just down the street from our hotel.  It reminded me of one we had seen in Milwaukee this summer and we wanted to see if we could find the artist's name to see if they were by the same artist (it was the same artist!  There aren't very many sculptures like this that he has in the US, so it's crazy that we spotted two already!).

There was a playground that the kids loved running around on for a while.

The kids loved being introduced to Chupa Chups in the hotel lobby!

We met Roy back at the hotel and went down to the park outside the hotel for lunch.  On Sundays they set up tables and umbrellas and blankets and bring in a lot of food and art vendors (I saw a painting that I really liked but didn't know how to get home with us!  I've found the artist has an etsy shop online though!).  We checked out all our options and sampled some of the desserts before choosing our lunch.  Leighton had an empanada, Roy and Riley got pizza, and I got some Mexican.

After lunch, the kids and I got in an Uber and went to La Jolla.  I had really wanted to go tide pooling and read this was a great spot with several beaches to try out.  We brought some water shoes with us (glad I read that tip!) so we were able to walk through a cave and on the slippery rocks.  We saw a lot of seals and sea lions (but did not get as close to them as many tourists did), some sea anemones, little fish, hermit crabs, and other crabs.  There weren't a lot of tide pools that we found, but we had so much fun playing in the water and collecting shells.  We only went to 3 beaches, and I think the better tide pooling may have been at the next three or four beaches we decided not to walk to.  Next time!

our collection of shells, rocks, and sea glass

We walked up into the town and did some souvenir shopping, watched the sunset (would have been spectacular a few blocks away still at the beach, but I forgot about the time change and that the sun would be setting so soon and we had already cleaned our feet and left the beach!), and ate some gelato.

We got an Uber back to the hotel, walked to find some dinner to bring back to the hotel, and relaxed. Roy was giving a talk and went out for dinner for work.