Day 24

Monday, 30th June

We went to the Zoo, Zoo, Zoo ...

An early morning wander outside, revealed a message in the sky! Not a very good advertisement for themselves if they got it backwards!

We decided not to bother with breakfast at the hotel this morning - but to treat ourselves at Denny's! I had a grand slam with 2 eggs (easy over), bacon, hash browns and 2 pancakes - T and P had American breakfasts. None of us could eat most of it!

We had decided to go to spend the morning at Old Town. It was very Mexican! We enjoyed a couple of hours there and bought some souvenirs, including maracas and a Mexican wall-hanging thingie. Old Town was very worthy of a few photos!

hummingbird

Then we made our way over the Coronado Bridge to Coronado! We went the wrong way and entered the Naval Establishment by mistake - we were allowed to turn around and try again! We parked at the Hotel Del Coronado, mainly because there was nowhere else to park - and it cost us a hefty $13 for the privilege. We had a look around the hotel - I'm glad we hadn't stayed there - it was way too posh (ie way too expensive!) although I suppose it did have some charm. We sat on the beach for a while.

oops!

From Coronado, we continued on down Silver Strand Beach - but there was no way to get on it - rubbish!! We parked at Imperial Beach and enjoyed (yes!) our best Subway (honest!) of the trip! We were very close to the Mexican Border and decided to turn around and drive back to the hotel briefly, before going to San Diego Zoo, where we chose to go, over SeaWorld!

We arrived at the zoo and paid our entrance, including the bus tour and the sky train. The bus tour was rather a waste of money. Yes, it did take you around some of the zoo and give you a rough idea of which animals you might like to come back to - but you couldn't see any animals!! We got off and looked at the map. It was such a HUGE zoo (and, non-smoking everywhere - I have nothing against non-smoking, in fact, I'm all in favour of it - but if they are allowed to sell the darned things, people should be allowed to smoke them, even if in some dark cubby-hole somewhere!) We took the sky train, which was HORRENDOUSLY HIGH and WOBBLY to the polar bears, who were asleep. Then we walked down (a long way!) to the pandas. Mercifully, there was no line to see them - and they were very cute - especially the baby panda, asleep in a hammock! We then walked to the exit (took an hour or so!) via a sad gorilla and some gorgeous orang-utans! We were very disappointed in the zoo - the enclosures were way too small and outdated. The place was massive and the map was useless. We probably made the wrong choice.

Time to go back to the hotel and pack our bags. I checked in online and (eventually, after a lot of trouble!), managed to print our boarding passes in the hotel business center.

This is the sunset of our trip. :(

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[ Introduction ] [ Day 1 ] [ Day 2 ] [ Day 3 ] [ Day 4 ] [ Day 5 ] [ Day 6 ] [ Day 7 ] [ Day 8 ] [ Day 9 ]
[ Day 10 ] [ Day 11 ] [ Day 12 ] [ Day 13 ] [ Day 14 ] [ Day 15 ] [ Day 16 ] [ Day 17 ]
[ Day 18 ] [ Day 19 ] [ Day 20 ] [ Day 21 ] [ Day 22 ] [ Day 23 ] [ Day 24 ] [ Day 25 ] [ Day 26 ]

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