California Vacation 2024 Part One - pre-trip happenings and arrival at San Diego

 After a busy month of August moving 3 adult children into 3 different universities, we were looking forward to a big California vacation.....just the two of us!  The entire vacation worked out better than we anticipated, but did start out with a couple of problems....

The first problem was the reason why we were traveling to California:  New York Life's President Council.  Earlier in the week, prior to travel, we had gotten notified that there was a hotel worker strike, and to expect some inconveniences during our stay at the San Diego hotel we were expecting to stay at.  But then, a little over 24 hours before we were set to fly to California, NYL canceled the Council meeting due to the reports that the people striking were getting aggressive towards the hotel guests and they couldn't guarantee our safety.  Since this part of the trip was only 1/3 of our vacation, Darrell quickly found an AirBnB in San Diego, extended out rental car, and everything fell into place fairly easily.

The second problem occurred when we landed in San Diego, and only 3 out of our 4 bags made the trip.  This proved to be a pretty easy problem for the airline to figure out, and since we agreed to go and retrieve my bag later in the day, we received a $150 flight voucher, which was perfect timing to use it towards Evan's Thanksgiving flight home!  (Thank you SouthWest Airlines!)

Since we landed in San Diego before lunch, we were able to do a couple of things that first day.  We found a deli to pick up salads and ate them at Balboa Park (although NOT on the nice side of the park).  We checked into our AirBnB, found a local Trader Joe's, and bought food to last us the four days we would be in San Diego.  Then we drove to Ocean Beach, ate at Mike's Taco Club https://www.mikestacoclub.com/#mikes for dinner (highly recommend their tacos!)  

We walked Sunset Cliffs at dusk and experienced our first San Diego sunset, which was not only stunning but also at 7 p.m.!  That first day was a long, hot travel day, but we were thankful everything worked out.