Tenth Day: to San Diego

OK, a concession to time and reality: Jason and I have made it all the way into Tennessee and are staying in Jackson, after a fun afternoon nearby in Memphis. Saw some good blues and R&B, and had some really good pork barbecue on Beale Street, the historic area of nightclubs in Memphis. Now back to your regularly scheduled update...

Monday July 16, 2007, 11 pm:

We slept in a little after crashing somewhat early in Vegas. We got driving and it is through a lot of desert from Nevada into Southern California. At times it felt like we were driving on the moon or something. A couple of times we went over some mountains, and then back into more desert. We took I-15 to I-215 and skirted west of LA through San Bernardino and Riverside to get to San Diego. We passed through Zzyxx, CA, which is a funny name for a town.

Once you get to San Bernardino, everything starts to look like California. And everything starts to look like everything else. Although around San Diego in particular, they haven’t finished building any bridges as far as we could tell, as every overpass in sight was under construction and detours abounded. I thought San Diego has been around for a long time now, but I guess they’re still building it. Also, several times we thought we’d seen the elusive Hawaii license plate, only to discover that it was a Mexican plate. We saw a lot of those.

Along the way Jason remembered that Janet, his dad's friend who we’ll be staying with in L.A. told us about the San Diego Wild Animal Park outside of San Diego. We looked it up in the trusty AAA book and discovered it is 30 miles north of the city, which we were rapidly approaching. It was mid-afternoon, so we decided to make a stop at the place. It is a pretty cool park that is largely an Africa-themed zoo where everything is outdoors. It is quite large with a couple of areas that are best seen by tram, which we accomplished. We walked most of the rest of the park and took copious pictures. The largest giraffe in the U.S. is at this park, as are a number of large African animals I’d never heard of. Also: gorillas, cheetahs, lions, meerkats, rhinos, elephants, etc. At one point on the tram tour we passed by a young, 6-point buck that walked right next to the tram, but the tour guide continued to talk about the zebras way at the bottom of the hill below. We also caught a show with a caracal (like a lynx) that was on a leash with a trainer and jumping 6 feet in the air after a toy. Quite impressive.

After the park, we checked into our Days Inn that we had reserved the night before. We then drove on to Coronado, which is an island/isthmus across the bay from San Diego. I had visited there once before through work on a Navy-sponsored trip. It was quite breezy and mile, to the point that I was getting cold and thought that we had hit possibly the coldest point of the trip. I was grateful that I brought my windbreaker for the evening. We had a nice seafood dinner at the Brigantine. Then we checked out the Hotel Del Coronado, which is one of the nicest hotels in the area. We walked through the nice lobby to the back deck and had our first sighting of the Pacific Ocean. Success! We made it all the way across the continent. Now to see if we can make it back…