San Diego, California

For spring break, we went on an amazing vacation to San Diego, California which was for Paul's senior year vacation. We drove down to the Denver airport and took an airplane from there to California. From there, we got a rental car and then went to our hotel. We stayed at the Hyatt hotel, which had three pools and a hot tub, as well as three water slides. It was amazing, and when we got there that night we went for a swim, though the hot tub was full of drunk college kids. The hotel has amazing beds so we went to sleep with me, Dad, and Josh in one room and Paul, Bob, and Laura in the other. The next day was Sunday, so we woke up, ate breakfast at Einstein Bros. Bagels, then went to just sacrament meeting for church. After that, we went to Coronado Beach which has really soft sand and pretty calm waves. That was great, and then we spent some time in our hotel pools. After that, we went to a beach called La Jolla Cove, which had bigger waves, but also had rocks. :( We pretty much just dipped our feet in there and suntanned.

This is a picture of Dad and Josh at Coronado Beach. Dad didn't want to get in the water much, but he went and played with Josh.

On our first trip to the beach (Coronado) Josh buried himself completely in sand. This is a picture of him getting buried in the soft sand.While we were driving around, we saw a restaurant (I think) that had a sign that said what is says in the picture below. We thought it was pretty funny, because it is a mixture of Spanish and English, and it is just pretty random.
Lately, my favorite car is a Mini Cooper and I am basically obsessed. :) There were a lot of Mini Coopers in California and I saw this blue one in our hotel parking lot. It is the prettiest car I've ever seen.

One night, Bob, Dad, and I went to Mission Beach to see the beautiful sunset. This is a picture of the sunset we saw.

On Monday, we went to Sea World and they had a lot of cool animals there. This is a picture of some turtles we saw there.

At Sea World, they also had a beautiful beluga whale, which is what the picture below is.

I am hoping this video works, but in Sea World, we saw a puffin exhibit and there was one who kept spazzing out in the water. It was really funny and below is a video of it.

We went to the San Diego Zoo on Tuesday, and this is a picture of Dad standing next to a random pot of flowers near the entrance.

This is a picture of the flamingos at the San Diego Zoo. It's hard to tell in this picture, but they curl their necks around all weird.

On Thursday, we drove about an hour and a half to visit our Uncle Ky and Rick, who live in L.A. We spent the day we them and Ky's massive german shepherd, named Brando. He is only two years old yet comes up to probably further than my waist. They have an amazing home, that has parts of it opened up to the sky, and it is beautiful. They took us on a boat ride, which we got to drive, and we saw John Wayne's home, and many other huge houses. It was fun, and this picture below is our boat. We also saw where they used to live, which was in a home with a great view of the beach, and they have huge houses in that neighborhood. We saw one that they call "the hobbit house" that looked like it could fit four large families into it. It even had a chapel in the backyard! After that, we ate out for lunch at El Ranchito, a Mexican restaurant. Then we went back to their house, and we stayed in their jacuzzi for a while. While no one is is in the jacuzzi, it is a little fountain, but they can turn off the fountain and turn on the jets and the heat and it turns into a hot tub! We had fun at their house that afternoon, then we ate a delicious homeade dinner of barbecue chicken and pork, mashed potatoes, cole slaw, corn muffins and apple pie. We ate our dinner outside, and it tasted fantastic. We had so much fun with Ky and Rick!

On Wednesday night, Dad went to a session at the San Diego temple. This is a picture of it, and it is a really beautiful temple, with even a garden that opens to the sky inside.

We drove up to a place called Mount Soledad, which I kept calling Mount Piensas because I couldn't remember the name. :) Anyway, it is a place where you can look at basically all of San Diego. This is a picture of us standing with the view from Mount Soledad behind us.