San Diego Vacation [Part 1]

Hi all! Just came back from a fun filled vacation weekend in sunny San Diego. It was our 4th Year Wedding Anniversary, and we happened to stumble on to $49 tickets each way on our Southwest.com. So, we decided to go to another SoCal location again this year! Left Thursday Morning, and got back to KC late Monday Night.

BTW, couldn't help noticing a "little miss sunshine" van in SD, so snapped a picture of it!

Here's highlights of what we did along the way:

Day (1): Woke up at 5am in the morning, caught plane to LA, landed at 8.30am. Yep. Gotta love Pacific Time. Drove to the "original" Farmer's Market in LA, really happy to beat the early crowd ; Its the closest thing to a "Mamak Stall" food place in the U.S so far, so we were pretty jazzed! Now all that's missing is Malaysian food, and maybe a little less attention to cleanliness! BTW, there's a "Singaporean" stall there, but we wouldn't recommend it. Apparently Singaporean Prime Ministers have dined there before, but Yeesin & I strongly discourage our fellow Malaysians from trying the food there! We spent the next couple of hours trying to wash the taste out of our mouths !!!

Spent some time in the LaBrea Tar Pits where they have the most extensive collection of wolves + vultures (too bad no dinosaurs) of fossils that got stuck in the tar 10K-20K years ago. Yeesin managed to snag a photo with this handsome devil of a Mastodon. I don't think I can measure up to his Ginormous TUSKS, but I think the fact that I DIDN'T get stuck in Tar and die a horrible death makes me win the popularity contest! Note to other husbands - Fossils are decidedly NOT very romantic, so we proceeded quickly to wine-country instead!

Driving out of LA to wine country took slightly longer than we thought. Fun Fact here- Rush Hour in LA starts at 3PM! Basically every freeway out, no matter what number (I-15,I- 91, 1, 101, etc) is jammed up. Car pool lanes don't help much either, the crawl along slightly faster than the other poor souls in the fully-stopped lanes. Heck, they even can pay $10 to drive in the car pool lane if you're alone... Anyway, after 3 hours in traffic, we finally pulled into the city limits of Temecula Wine Country! Another item of import, when driving out of LA, don't drink lots of water! Somehow gas stations with working toilets will be always just out of reach when you are stuck in traffic!!!

TO BE CONTINUED....