Mid-chaos Vacation Part I: San Diego and Laguna Beach

In the middle of transferring from St Louis to Dallas, we figured it'd be as good a time as any to hop a plane and decompress for a few days.  My last day of work was July 6th, and that night we drove to the airport en route for California.  We got into San Diego a little later than anticipated as we got hung up on the tarmac in Denver waiting for a storm to clear, so we didn't see any of the city Friday night. We were up bright and early though (yay for time zone changes but body clock not changing) Saturday to take on the day.  We hopped back in our car and headed over to Coronado to get some beautiful views of the city.  Highly recommended!

They had a cute market area with art galleries and boutique shops that we wandered through a bit.  Then we started driving down the coast to Imperial Beach. Full disclosure, we drove there because I wanted to go to the most Southwestern part of the US without being in Mexico (nerd flag flying and I don't even care), and Terry found reviews for a fresh seafood restaurant out on a pier (done and done! Will write about it in a food post about the trip).
Obligatory feet in the Pacific photo.

 He joined us for lunch on the pier.

We drove back into the city later in the day and went out around the gaslamp district to various restaurants and bars.  

The next day, we did the downtown tourist scene all day and had a blast.  We walked through a farmers market, we strolled through Seaport Village and the San Diego Marina, oh and we did a lot of fresh seafood eating while we could.

Monday we were up early to start our drive up to visit Terry's family.  His grampa lives right outside of Los Angeles in a town called Oxnard, so we drove up the coast and made a few stops in Laguna Beach and Santa Monica.  The views in Laguna were beautiful and we were the only ones on the beach. 

 I'm a lucky girl.

 

 We stopped in to Santa Monica to walk up on the pier and get some lunch.  We found a fish market on the way out of town that had us both drooling and wishing we didn't have to leave. 

We did happily pry ourselves out of the market though because we had family to visit.  I'm going to write up a full post about our visit, but here's a preview.

Until tomorrow :-)