San Diego: Parks

Our first stop on the "places to tour" list was the Zoo.



Neither Christopher nor I had been there since we were 12 or so, and so all we can remember is that it is A: huge/amazing and B: full of hills. Oh, and I remember getting my food in a cool little bucket. All of those things are quite true, in fact. It was a great zoo. We especially loved that they have a tour on a bus, so even if you spend the rest of the day trudging around and barely see anything else, you can leave feeling like to got to see the whole zoo.



Of course, moving buses are not good places to take pictures from. That one above is the best I could do. I have to say that nature and wildlife photography is the type that draws me the most . . . but I just don't have time for it. If I wanted to take awesome pictures of animals, I would need to set up a tripod and spend an hour or two waiting for each animal to do just what I wanted to see them do. Not happening with toddlers. Oh well, I can enjoy it for a few minutes at a time. I spend the rest of my time trying to make my monkey stop climbing on all of the fences to see things better.



Sorta like this monkey. (Don't let the mean face scare you, he was acutally laughing at me.)



Good thing there were productive things for my monkey to do. Like pretending to be a sea lion.



Or a polar bear.



Tyler is a tough sell on zoos, mainly because he doesn't really like to look at what people tell him to look at. So finding the animals off in the distance isn't really his thing. Kaitlyn was happy enough for both of them, though.



And he did like petting the goats. That was nice and up close for him.



And lunch. We packed our own sandwiches, but the tables were sure cute.



We also went and saw a sea lion show. This little girl was picked out of the audience to play with them, and when she headed back up to her seat, Kaitlyn turned to me and said "my turn?!" Sorry, nope.




Our next stop was Sea World. This was my husband's favorite park, since there was a lot of fun stuff to see and it was all close together (with no hills).



Tyler thought the dolphin show was hilarious- he laughed whenever they jumped out of the water.



And I loved the acrobats they had performing with the dolphins - it was very impressive!



The Shamu show was a fun challenge for me. It was a really fun game to try and watch the trainers and the dark blobs under the water to try and guess where the killer whales were going to jump up next. And I am really proud of this shot! You know, minus the stairs in the background.




There were a lot of fun things to see and do too - the kids loved touching the starfish with daddy, and I think the penguins were pretty cool too.



Also on our list was a trip to Old Town. We didn't head there early enough in the day to see everything we wanted to, but we did get to the Mormon Batallion museum. They have some fun toddler things at the end, like making bricks and panning for gold.




And last, but not least, we headed to the USS Midway. This is a view from our sailing trip a few days before. It is a large aircraft carrier that you can tour, complete with over a dozen aircraft sitting on it.



I was really looking forward to this one because my dad was actually stationed on a carrier just like this in Vietnam. His was called the USS Oriskany. We can't tour that one, though- they sunk it intentionally off the coast of Florida to make an artificial reef. Well, you can tour it, if you know how to scuba dive.

But I digress.

The kids were a bit bored with the rest of the tour (which fascinated us), but they did like sitting in the cockpits whenever they got the chance.



The rest of the tour was interesting though. We were especially suprised by the enlisted men's barracks - where my dad would have slept. They were stacked three high in tiny little mattresses. It was bad enough when we saw the first stack, done up in the hallway so you could see what they looked like. Then we passed an entire room full of them. They must have packed thirty people in a room 12x20, it felt like. And you didn't even get a bed to yourself - they rotated shifts on them!



I talked to my dad before we left about what his job was on the ship. He said he was a "communications yeoman", and it was his job to sit in the squadron ready room (VA Squadron 153) and sort through messeges, relaying them back and forth, as well as writing in the pilot's log books for them. Twelve hours on, then twelve hours off, seven days a week.

Best I could figure, this guy right here was my dad, sitting at a desk in the ready room.



I don't know that it meant much to anyone else, but I thought it was really cool to see a bit of . . . family history like that. It was fun to talk to my parents about the years that they lived in San Diego, the things my dad did in the Navy while he was stationed there, and all of their memories.

It was a great trip!