So I was pondering how to properly divide up the blog posts for this trip, and I think the only thing I’ve really settled on is having a final post on Monday that has as many pictures as I care to upload and put up as a slideshow/gallery. I think the problem is that I’ve only been here 1 and a half days, and I’ve taken…411 pictures. That poses a problem for what to add into each blog post. Even if I divide the posts by day, the sheer number of pictures is just ridiculous. Maybe a gallery post for each day too? It’s really quite a conundrum. I think putting up SOME pictures from each day and just leaving you with mouths watering for more is the best way to do it. Even then I’ve only been able to pick like 40 pictures. I guess we’ll see how this turns out. I may have to be more selective with my picture picking. That way you have something to look forward to on Monday/Tuesday. Let us start from the beginning shall we?

Katrina and I departed for DTW at 11:20 for our 1:30 flight. Neither of us had flown on Southwest before, but at the recommendation of my boss, I thought I’d give it a try. As there is no assigned seating, I was curious to see how much chaos would present itself, but I was pleasantly surprised at how few problems there were. Well the problems were pretty much non-existant. I guess some my faith in society/humanity was restored. Our flight consisted of a flight to Midway airport in Chicago for the first hour, a two hour layover, and then a 4 hour flight to San Diego. I had never been to any of these airports before so it was a pretty good way to pass time exploring what we could. Katrina spent her time reading the Hunger Games on my tablet during our Chicago wait. I decided that since she’s pretty athletic, and that their names begin with the same letters, that I was going to start calling her Katnip.

We arrived at 7 PM PST, and were promptly picked up by my friend Mary Lin. I was hoping she would be able to spend some time with us after we arrived at Carlsbad Inn Beach Resort, but she had to go back to work at 8 PM when we were dropped off. Katrina and I checked in, and when we arrived we realized they had given us a king kitchenette room instead of the double queen room I ordered. Since there were no double queen rooms left though, they upgraded us to a junior suite at no extra charge. There was a manta towel ray on our bed and Oatmeal decided to go talk to him. They became fast friends, but the manta had no name. Katnip and I named him Carl.

After we got settled, we went to eat dinner at this little Italian restaurant, Caldo Pomodoro. The food was pretty reasonably priced for dinner, and it was delicious. We hadn’t eaten anything all day so I managed to order a ton of food. The fried calamari was delicious, the breading wasn’t too heavy and the Calamari was extremely fresh. My veal marsala was tender and delicious, and Katnip’s homemade sausage entree was scrumptious. She still had her leftovers in our fridge until she ate them last night.

When we finished dinner, our cousin Oliver had just arrived and we went to the beach at night and explored a bit. The water was surprisingly very warm, and we waded in as far we would allow ourselves to not get swept away by the tide. I tried to get a cool night-time pic like I took for Katrina, but she was too scared of the water in the dark. *rolls eyes*

We went back and just got ready for bed, it was pretty late (~3 AM EST) and so we figured we should go to bed and prepare for our long day tomorrow. But that’s for a post later tonight. Keep in mind, these are only a fraction of the pictures.  I’ll post the rest after we get back to the mitten state.

ARGH I JUST TRIED TO POST THIS AND I LOST EVERYTHING SO I HAD TO REWRITE EVERYTHING. SO IRRITATED.

This post was written while I was on the beach and I just kept the tab open thinking it would have auto-saved the draft when I was working on it just now and it didn’t. As I added all 40 pictures to this post, captioned them, and sorted them. I’m so irritated. At least it’s up now.This post would’ve been up sooner, but the pictures took a lot longer to organize and sort out than I anticipated, so the text content for most of the other posts are done, it’s just a matter of getting pictures into them and uploading them, so I’ll be working on that when I get back to the D. Thanks for stopping by.

-Evilmanta