Tuesday June 27
After the crazy adventure getting in, our first night was a wash. We ate, said hello, then quickly collapsed. Monki experienced jetlag and was up at 1:30am, ready for the day to start. We were kept active with her until 5:30 when we were finally able to get a couple more hours of sleep.
Tuesday was a nice, fresh start. Greeting were actually exchanged, and plans were made. We had figured on taking Tuesday off from doing any type of touristic activities (we had those planned for later in the week) and just hanging out with family. Of course, since family was also on vacation (and weren’t dealing with jet-lagged almost 1-year-olds) they had decided to go and visit the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, (which used to be called the Wild Animal Park) making use of their recently purchased San Diego Go cards.
This left us with the day to ourselves. Our first order of business was to get some shopping out of the way. There was some baby stuff we needed (and I wanted to check out “airline approved” car seats) so we figured Target would be a good bet. Before shopping though, we were hungry and figured a nice breakfast place would fit the bill. See, when we were first planning this trip, I asked Rasa what she would like to do or see while we were in the States. She’d never been to San Diego before so we looked at some guidebooks and had some discussions – but the one thing which remained constant was her desire for American style pancakes. Now, here we were, in America, looking for a place to fulfill that promise. Luckily, just down from Target, was a place called The Broken Yolk. It closed at 3pm, but since we still had 10 minutes before then, they let us inand sat us in the near empty cafe.
This was actually a momentous occasion for us. Back home, we don’t eat out much, for a variety of reasons. Rasa cooks is a big one, and honestly, there really aren’t many places near us to go out (when we lived in Old Town there were many more, but out here, not so much). But now, we were coming in to to a place, ready to order pancakes, when the hostess asked a question we had yet to deal with: “Do you need a high-chair?”
Since we rarely went out, we had never actually taken Monki to a restaurant to eat. We had no idea how she’d react to anything, from sitting in a high-chair not her own, to sitting in a banquette, to dealing with other people. What ended up happening was everything was just fine. We ordered our food and she ate off our plates, spending some time in the chair and some sitting in the booth. She loved running around the restaurant (it was empty so that was okay) and making a mess of the sugar and jam packets (which, yes, we cleaned up before we left – this, by the way, would be a recurring theme of this trip).
We finished eating and headed over to Target. Our first order of business was baby food – since we’d run out during the flight (see last episode) and we also needed a new hand mixer since we couldn’t find the one we’d packed (we found it eventually, allaying our fears it had been stolen by customs agents – not that that would have been surprising considering everything we’d gone through the day before, but still…). Naturally, we picked up some other things as well – a couple of Finding Dory towels were on sale and, in a rush of impulse buying prompted by the woman ahead of us in line, a juice bottle with the head of Darth Vader as a dispenser. When Rasa grabbed it, of course, she had only been looking at the contents, wanting to get apple juice for Monki. It wasn’t until later she realized she’d gotten the Dark Lord for whom she had such a fondness.
It was getting later in the day and without a wifi connection, we were pretty much out of reach (oddly, Dad could text me but Mom could not) so we headed back to the house and see what was what. No one was home when we got back so, new towels in hand, we loaded up for the beach.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to the beach, even longer since I’ve been with a baby, so we might have made a few mistakes – including trying to bring the stroller out onto the sand – but what are ya gonna do? Eventually, we found a nice spot and hung out for a bit, with Monki getting her first taste of waves and sand. Aside from the water being cold, she seemed to like watching the waves move back and forth. The cold water rolling over her feet, on the other hand, was not nearly as exciting. Neither was the sand. All in all, I’d say she gave the beach a solid 6 with room for improvement.
Since she didn’t seem too keen on staying at the beach, we packed up again and just went for a stroll (good thing we had the stroller, huh?). We saw all sorts of neat little places to eat (several of which we’d try over the course of the next few days) but nothing to really dig into then. We ended up walking quite a ways, eventually not finding anything at all which suited our appetites. Instead we went back to the house and made some food there. By that point, everyone was back from the Safari Park so we heard some stories about the day before heading off to bed.
Getting the Hang of Thursdays 