San Diego

It's been a little while now, but we've been meaning to post some pictures from a recent trip we took to San Diego. This was a few weeks ago now, and it was the reason for my post about Kansas City way back when. That post was made while I was sitting at the airport during a layover on my way out to San Diego.

The original point of the trip was the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, but we made a little vacation out of it. I know that the meeting sounds incredibly dorky and well, it is. But that doesn't necessarily mean that a group of neuroscientists are all that smart, or even that they know how to spell.


Anyway, we went out to San Diego a few days before the conference started. We have been there several times before for various reasons. I guess we're frequent enough visitors to San Diego that some people have asked me if I've lived there because I tend to know enough about the place that it seems like I might have lived there. Our visit happened to be right after the southern California fires that threatened San Diego in late October, but fortunately the fires never got anywhere near the city.

We have seen many of the sights of San Diego and southern California in the past, so we tried to see some sights that we've missed in the past. Our first full day was spent in La Jolla. We went to the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institute in the morning and saw a bunch of cool exhibits. Its not the biggest aquarium out there, but they had quite a collection and it was well worth the nominal entry fee. If you're interested, you can see a bunch of pictures we took here. You can see that we went a bit photo crazy and seemed to be taking pictures of just about everything. I also got some video which seems to have come out pretty well. I'll have to try to post those later.


We spent the afternoon in the town of La Jolla, having lunch in a little Thai cafe and then walking around the shore to do a little sight-seeing and picture-taking of the ocean. Even though I grew up in New York and spent quite a bit of time by the ocean, its a completely different situation in La Jolla. We're not really talking about sandy beaches, but rather a bit of a rugged, rocky shoreline that is constantly being battered by the sea. The tide certainly comes in fast too. While we were walking around a small beach area, the ocean almost caught me. I had to run up into a little cave to avoid some of the waves. We did seem to get a handful of cool pictures, which can be viewed here.

During our visit, we also got the chance to go to our favorite Mexican restaurant, the Old Town Mexican Cafe. Besides the food being amazing, the ambiance is top-notch and don't even get me started on the tortillas! I think we were too busy eating to take pictures, but we did manage to get a few, like this one and this one.


We also had a chance to walk along the water in downtown San Diego, visiting Seaport Village and checking out some of the ships docked in the area. Among the ships docked there are the USS Midway, which has been decommissioned and has been converted into a museum. What I considered even more interesting, though, were some of the older ships that make up the maritime museum. It was yet again one of those things we had to take many pictures of. Around the area was also a pretty neat World War II memorial, including this statue based on a famous photo. It was a little unfortunate, however, that this area seemed to be a haven for drunken homeless people that like to scream somewhat obscene comments. I also found it a bit weird that there were a bunch of Japanese tourists that seemed to love posing with the statues of the WWII-era soldiers.

Unfortunately, at some point I had to actually go to the conference so our sight-seeing had to come to an end. It was a fun trip overall.