San Diego 2008

The inspiration for the San Diego trip came when I decided, in April, that I wanted to follow the Cubs on a road trip this season.  After checking out the available options and discussing with Alma which city would most interest her as a vacation destination otherwise, San Diego won out.  I bought tickets for two Cubs/Padres games at Petco Park, and we scheduled a trip leaving Sunday, June 1, and returning Friday, June 6.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

We took a nonstop flight from O'Hare to San Diego, then picked up the rental car and drove to the hotel.  Since we arrived later in the day, we really didn't make any effort to do anything; after unpacking into the hotel room, we had dinner at the Baker's Square which served as the hotel's restaurant.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Our first order of business was a trip to Balboa Park, which bills itself as "the nation's largest urban cultural park" (not sure who the competitors were for that one).  Like many places in San Diego, though, it's a little amazing to think that you're in the middle of a city.  The hotel turned out to have been pretty centrally located; we were two minutes from the crossing point of I-8 and I-5, which enabled us to get anywhere we wanted to go in pretty short order.  To get to Balboa Park, it was a quick ride east on the 8, then south on a state route.  The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes, which was nice.  After parking at the southernmost point of the park, we took the tram up into the center, the area known as El Prado, where the bulk of the museums are concentrated.

We needed lunch before doing anything else, so we went to the Prado Restaurant, which turned out to be a pretty classy joint.  Alma got the fish tacos, which disappointed her a bit because they used grilled fish rather than the standard breaded fish.  (I had her last taco, which I actually enjoyed thanks to the onion-jicama medley they included, which added nice flavor and crunch.)  I got a Kobe beef burger (it probably wasn't "real" Kobe beef, but whatever), which was pretty good - extremely tender, certainly, although you could argue that turning Kobe beef into a hamburger patty is a "waste" to some degree.  I enjoyed it.

Alma loves taking pictures of me when I'm in the midst of enraptured eating.

The architecture in Balboa Park is nice to look at, with a lot of it echoing the area's Mission period.  Since it was Monday, not a lot of museums were open, and anyway you had to pay separately to get into each, so we stuck with the Natural History museum, which had an exhibit on Pompeii, and the Botanical Building (which was free).

Here I am right out front of the restaurant.  It was a bright sunny day; this was something of a running theme.

One of many nice-looking exteriors that we saw as we walked around the Prado area.

Another fetching exterior.  Note all the palm trees, always a reliable indicator of being someplace with kickass weather.

The Botanical Building from the outside.  For some reason, being inside of it made me think of post-war California in the 40s and 50s, right as it was really starting to develop - something about the way the building was made just brought to mind a bygone era.

The "Carnivorous Plant Bog," which featured Venus fly traps (you can see them in the back middle), butterworts, sundews and pitcher plants.

In the background, coffee; in the foreground, tea.

The "flamingo flower," which was named with a pretty high degree of accuracy.

I just found the name of this one hilarious.  "Dude, I scored some mondo grass!   Have you got any papers?"

I probably get unreasonably excited whenever I run across a plant with "flax" in the name.

Yes, I think "unreasonably excited" is a pretty fair description.  Although that face is at least 30% sarcasm.

This, on the other hand, is 0% sarcasm.  But come on.  Baby pineapple, right on the plant!  That's too cool.  I actually signed the guestbook with "The baby pineapple was awesome!" as we were leaving.

All right, settle down.

The "touch and smell plants" were pretty fun.  You just rub the leaves lightly and then your fingers really do smell like whatever mint it was.  Sometimes there were mint plants that actually smelled more like citrus, which was sort of random.

And here I am giving it a go.  The yellow stuff on the left was supposed to be curry-scented, but it really didn't smell like much, the only disappointment of the bunch.

Walkin' around, checkin' out some plants.  All these pictures were taken with Alma's camera, by the way, so that's why I'm going to appear by myself in most of them.

A good shot of California Tower, which is attached to the Museum of Man, in the background.  In the foreground is the lily pond out front of the Botanical Building.

This skeleton of a large ground sloth was part of an exhibit inside the Natural History Museum.  Pictures aren't allowed in the Pompeii exhibit so I don't have too much of interest to show you from this one.  This skeleton just amused me because they managed to make the sloth look super aggressive, but then if you look up at the artist's rendering, it looks all dopey and slow, just like a normal sloth.  I wouldn't want to mess with those claws, though.

At the western end of the Prado area is Cabrillo Bridge, which crosses over SR-163, the very same freeway we took to get to the park, meaning that if we could have traveled back in time, we would have seen ourselves driving underneath.  Although the canyon is pretty deep below Cabrillo Bridge so we probably wouldn't have recognized the car anyway.  Once we realized that the view from the bridge was, at best, pretty mediocre, Alma asked dismissively why we had even come out there, at which point I found this plaque marking the bridge as a civil engineering landmark.  I think Alma took this picture more or less sarcastically.

Nevertheless, she got a nice shot of the Museum of Man (the dome to the left) and California Tower from the bridge.

Heading back from whence we came, we came across Alcazar Garden.  Aside from the Natural History Museum, which was packed with schoolchildren, we really had a lot of these places mostly to ourselves.  I also thought the tree in the background here was pretty neat.

I never did find out what kind of tree this was, but it had these three large trunks.  Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, they had been carved up with messages like crazy, including various names, dates and initials and, most memorably, the claim that "ABI (heart) POOP."  I felt bad for Abi, but then for all I know that was totally accurate.

A look up into the tree.  It's cooler in person.

On the way back to the car, we decided to make a side trip into Palm Canyon, a small walking area where you really did descend into a canyon filled with many different types of palm trees.  It's not like other cities don't have parks where you can take relatively secluded, quiet strolls (especially on a Monday afternoon when most people are still at work), but of course I don't often get to, and the foliage being so different from what I'm used to made it much more entertaining.

Proof that I walked somewhere.

So, after our excursion to Balboa Park, Alma and I drove back to the hotel and prepared to go to the Cubs game at 7.  There were a couple possible transportation options, but having done some research online, I found that we could take a bus to the nearby (but not so nearby as to be walkable) Old Town Transportation Center, where we could catch a trolley that would then take us right to Petco Park.  As it turned out, there were quite a number of other Cubs fans on the trolley and at the game; while it's not like there are figures on this, it sure seemed like the attendance mix was virtually 50/50, and if it wasn't so in terms of actual numbers, then it certainly was in noise level for much of the game.  We were seated in right field, four rows back from the field - pretty great seats for 28 bucks each.  Our section seemed to be largely Cubs fans, as it happened, which was good as the game progressed.

Things started annoyingly - first, I was stuck in the world's slowest concession line just to get a couple hot dogs and some fries, missing the first pitch as a result.  Then it turned out that the single loudest Padres fan in the stadium was seated almost directly behind my head.  And then Carlos Zambrano gave up three runs in the bottom of the first and things were not looking so hot.  The Cubs rallied, though, getting a run back on a wild pitch in the second and then tying the game in the fourth when Jim Edmonds - who had started the season with the Padres and was booed mercilessly each time he came to bat as a result - doubled home Kosuke Fukudome, and then scored himself when Zambrano tripled.  The Cubs scored again in the fifth to take the lead, then twice more in the sixth, and finally added one more in the seventh as Edmonds doubled home Fukudome again, prompting one guy in our section to stand up and wave his arms at the Padres fans, yelling, "Thanks for letting us have him for free!"

With the Cubs up 7-3 - i.e., it wasn't a save situation - they let Carlos Marmol, who'd gotten the last two outs in the eighth, stay in to pitch the bottom of the ninth.  Marmol recorded one out on a pop fly to second, but gave up a walk and a single, and then up stepped Adrian Gonzalez, the Padres' home run leader - who proceeded to hit Marmol's 1-2 pitch to the right field seats, in fact just one section over from us and maybe a row or two down.  The stadium erupted, fireworks went off, and I was not very happy.  Fortunately, Kerry Wood came in to get the last two outs, which he did, striking out Tony Clark on three pitches and getting Michael Barrett to fly out, although this was to deep left field and looked unnervingly like tying the game for a few seconds.  Cubs win, 7-6, extending my personal win streak to seven.

The pictures from the game were taken with Alma's phone, so they're of much lower quality.  Sorry.  Anyway, this is the giant Petco scoreboard, here displaying the Cubs' starting lineup - Soriano, Theriot, Lee, Ramirez, Fukudome, Edmonds, DeRosa, Blanco and Zambrano.

The Cubs in the field - that's Fukudome in the front right of the shot, which should give you some idea of how close we were.  Given the time info I have for the photo, this is probably the bottom of the third inning, but that's a total guess.  Late in the game, a group of (probably) drunk Cubs fans one section over began chanting the names of the outfielders as is sometimes done at Wrigley, starting with "FU-KU-DO-ME!"  Once Fukudome had acknowledged them (I missed it, but Alma claims he turned around and gave a very tired-looking wave), they went on to chant "JIM-MY ED-MONDS!" and then finally "SO-RI-A-NO," until they realized that Soriano was actually out of the game for defensive reasons, at which point they changed to "RE-ED JOHN-SON!"  Johnson was pretty far away from them, in left, so I'm not sure if he ever got a chance to acknowledge them before the inning started.  But this story should give you an idea of just how many Cubs fans were at this game.

The group of blue at the middle of the photograph is the Cubs returning to the clubhouse after having won the game and celebrated the fact.

And here's me in my Cubs spring training/BP jersey, a few minutes after the Cubs had won.  I wondered what it would be like being the enemy - I'd only been to two Cubs road games before and the last one was when I was 14 (so long ago that Ryne Sandberg was the starting second basemen in that game), and I doubt I flew the colors as prominently in those games, if at all.  But of course there were thousands of Cubs fans to diffuse any harassment, and anyway the Padres fans seemed pretty laid back.

So, that was Monday.  Certainly a strong start to the trip, but there was lots more to come.