Sunday, August 1, 2010

summer trip 2010 - the drive to...

Another summer trip has arrived, yay! The two day drive went by quick with the exception of the last hour which dragged on and on. First night we stayed in a Deming NM La Quinta. First time I have stayed in that chain. It was clean but I was not impressed. On the second day I started making some interesting road observations: first - their are lots of prisons. I think we passed a total 6 in TX, NM and AZ. This shouldn't surprise me...a podcast I was listening to a few weeks ago mentioned that about 1 out of every 30 U.S. adults is either incarcerated, on probation or on parole. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. Makes you wonder, are US citizens more "bad" than citizens of other countries or, is the US system broken?

And, what's up with these "Safety Corridors" on the freeway...."speeding fines doubled." Are these just dangerous sections to travel on or, is it an easy way to enforce (concentrate) speed trapping efforts in rural areas. I do have to mention that we saw no mobile speed trap cameras in Arizona this time-I guess they were ramping up their anti-immigration efforts. And, fortunately we didn't have a run in with these fools. I wonder if they would the have cojones to stop these prison breakers whom authorities believe are making a run to the border? Hmmmm, my guess is absolutely not.

Ok...enough political banter.....the driving weather was great and surprisingly mild (low 70's because of some light rain) until Yuma, AZ - 100+. While driving I realized how much of a tech gadget dependency the entire family has....for example, at one point the girls had the DVD going while playing on our old iPhone's, D was streaming General Hospital on her MacBook while I was streaming a podcast I forgot to download before leaving. We also streamed Pandora to the iPad for hours on end. Pandora rocks.

While driving on IH10 in far west Texas I guess my cell phone automatically switched to a tower from Mexico because of this text message....
Almost $20 per MB, unbelievable
unless that's in pesos.

Just south of Las Cruces NM I took this shot of the sun & clouds with my iPhone...


We made really good time the second day and arrived in our San Diego hotel at 4:30pm local time. Here's the awesome view from our room....
That bridge on the right is actually not a road,
just for pedestrians and bikes.


After resting for a little bit we made our way to Pizza Nova. This is a must stop for us every time we are in San Diego - the best salad ever and some awesome pizza.

Just outside our Pizza Nova table

The girls had enough energy hit Sea World after dinner. We arrived around 7pm and it was packed to my surprise.
Apparently this is supposed to motivate Sea World
visitors to buy VW, I think Shamu would be offended

We were able to watch the Shamu Rocks and Sea Lion show - these were both night time versions. The Sea Lion show was very good - funny thing, though, it was great because one of the actors stole the show (actual person, not sea lion). After those two shows, a couple of rides and the fireworks finale we were spent.




1 comment:

Kali said...

Sounds like a nice little trip!!