San Diego Surprise

We took a quick weekend trip down to San Diego to surprise Kevin's mom for her birthday April 4. It was my first time to go to San Diego, so I was really excited, even though it was just for the weekend. Kevin arranged everything with Grandpa Dave before we went so he knew we were coming, and when we finally got there around 10:30 pm she was REALLY surprised! We got to see the hummingbird's nest outside their front door, and go to the beach and the San Diego Zoo. It was a short but fun trip.
When we went to the beach we had Allison in the stroller so I didn't really go down to the water, but we had a nice walk and of course Em's favorite part was walking on top of the wall. Any chance she gets she's walking on walls, bricks, stepping stones...
And what kind of beach trip would it be without an ice cream cone? Chocolatey drippy messy yummy ice cream! We also watched the artificial surfing machines going, which I just found out my friend Jessica got to try out on her recent trip to San Diego with her hubby. Lucky!
Saturday we spent the day at the San Diego Zoo. Grandpa Dave was able to get some free tickets from his mom and brother, so we only had to pay for one child admission - awesome! The SD Zoo is really large. The zoo I work at is only 18 acres, and the SD Zoo is around 100 and very hilly. It seemed enormous. They had so many animals that I had never before seen in real life, like polar bears, koalas, and of course, PANDAS! It was exciting. Although I do confess that I was scrutinizing and comparing all their habitats and visitor services the whole time...I concluded that they have a really great zoo, but I like the fact that you can get a lot closer to the animals at our zoo. Yay for us! And it seemed really amusement-park-like. Which I guess some people might really like (all the extra stuff to buy and what not), but it was a little over the top for me. I just like to focus on the animals.

Em was of course fascinated by the map. She had to hold it almost the entire time and pretended (well, in her mind she probably wasn't pretending) that she was finding our way through the huge park. She did a good job, even though she had it upside down most of the time!
And what would be a trip to a big famous zoo without the $10 souvenir cup? Em adored it, and the cool thing was you could get unlimited free refills, even with Icee, so we filled it up about five or six times and felt it was worth the money. Next time we are going to buy one of these on the way in, rather than towards the end!
I don't know why it's so hard for us to get a whole-family photo. I think we have taken maybe one of all of us in the past four months, and I haven't gotten a copy of it from my mom yet. Allison is in the stroller, so this kind of counts I guess.
Besides the zoo, we also got to go out to Hope and Dave's favorite Hawaiian restaurant, tour the Gaslamp district, visit Little Italy, see their new house that they are buying, and enjoy being together. What a great trip. Happy Birthday, Hope!