San Diego - Our kinda place

San Diego's got a lot going for it. It's got very nice weather, beautiful beaches, a nice city park, and lots of good Mexican food. It's wonderful to be able to enjoy the weather and do outdoorsy things at this time of the year. I guess that's one of the big advantages to full-time RVing - we get to drive to where the weather is nice.

We were lucky to find a great RV park to stay for a few of our nights in San Diego right on Mission Bay called Campland on the Bay. For 20 bucks a night, we were able to enjoy a spot just a couple hundred feet from the beach, and just a thirty second walk away from the pool/jacuzzi, with all the necessary RV hookups that alone usually cost $40/night. There were a ton of big RVs there, and a lot in San Diego in general, and I can see why.

We visited a couple beautiful beaches close to where we stayed. Mission beach is a thin strip of land about two hundred feet wide with the ocean on one side and the bay on the other side. We parked the RV, hopped on our bikes, and biked north along beach on the wavy ocean side and then back south along the back on the calm bay side. We also had lunch on Ocean Beach, which is a dog beach (dog park on the beach), and visited the ritzy town of Coronado Beach, which is near a U.S. amphibious Navy base where you can see Marines and Seals training from the highway.

We spent our last afternoon/night in San Diego at Balboa Park, which is the world's largest urban cultural park. There are 15 museums in the park, all of which normally cost money, but we happened to visit on a night when they were having a holiday festival, and all of the museums were free! We had a great time biking and walking around the park, and then enjoyed visiting a couple of the museums amongst the throngs of local festival go-ers.

Our favorite part of the night was the San Diego automotive museum. This place is full of beautiful exotic, classic, and vintage cars and motorcycles. But the highlight was a car and trailer from 1954 that broke (and still holds) the world's endurance non-stop record across the United States. For seven days, three men drove in five hour shifts drove over 7,400 miles from Anchorage, Alaska to Mexico city, re-fueling on the run from trucks on airport runways along the way. The custom car/trailer refilled the radiator and changed oil on the run, and even had hydraulic jacks with wheels attached that enabled the passengers to change a tire while still driving! The trailer holds 230 gallons of gas, 15 gallons of oil, and 30 gallons of water (50 more held in a tank in the car). At the back of the trailer is a tiny table for eating with a nation-wide mobile phone (in 1954?), and the men used a catwalk attached to the bottom of the war to walk outside and climb onto the trailer while moving. The story behind the car/trailer was also very cool - a man named Louis Mattar built it over seven years as a hobby with $75,000 of his own money, with no sponsors.

If anyone reading this visits San Diego any time soon, you should definitely check out that museum. The Mattar car was a lot of fun to see and read about.

We just got to LA, and we're staying with Lily's uncle Bob's brother Art. I'm going to work at one of the city's great restaurants while we're here. Then it's up north along the Pacific Coast Highway towards our next week-long stop, Monterey.

-Ben