San Diego

We have returned from our trip down to San Diego last weekend, visiting the extended Ebel family, and had a great time. A few notes:

• The drive from the Bay Area to San Diego really wasn't as bad as I was expecting. ~450 miles, about 7 hours going down as we avoided LA traffic by leaving Sunnyvale at 6:30pm. On the way back there was some LA traffic, but all in all it was quite manageable - nothing a few books on tape couldn't handle. Banjo tolerated admirably.
• Speaking of 'Jo, our dog was quite popular among the nieces and nephews. Well, mostly the nieces, but it was nice to see how well behaved around somewhat unpredictable children he was. Interestingly, he was very intrigued with the smells emanating from 6 month old Oliver.
• We had some great beach time at Del Mar and Solana Beaches, doing lots of boogie boarding and swimming, although we didn't play any of San Diego's famous game Over the Line. It was nice to be at a beach where you can swim in the water and not go hypothermic in 4 minutes!
• Surprisingly, (or maybe not) our favorite show at SeaWorld was "Pets Rule" - a montage of all sorts of non-aquatic pets doing cool tricks on a fancy showy obstacle course. This included several dogs, cats (including the one that leapt off a 30 ft tall pole into this guy's baseball glove), ducks, pot-bellied pigs, and even some doves. I think this show may have inspired Kate to seriously look into agility courses for Banjo. Shamu was cool, but we think they have toned down the show since the recent accident with one of the orcas.
  
• The smog in LA is seriously depressing.
• Kate's dried strawberries and kiwis were a big hit, although most people seem to prefer the kiwis without the skins.
• We ate lots of delicious home-cooked food, including Soheil's Persian chicken kabobs, Jee's Korean bbq, and our Carne Asada recipe, and lots of yummy fruit.
  

Also, I added a new poll feature on the sidebar there - stay tuned as we'll change it to keep it timely. It's new, and I don't think Blogger has it set up such that the font color is changeable, so bear with the black text for now.