Our day spent in La Jolla was our favorite day of the trip. If you are ever in the San Diego area, I highly recommend driving up to La Jolla for a day trip. The coastline is just gorgeous. The rocky cliffs and beaches were so foreign to us as we are accustomed to the flat, sandy Atlantic beaches in the Southeast. The girls loved exploring.
We visited Children's Pool which is a small beach protected by a sea wall.
It was originally built as a safe swimming beach, but now it is mostly just a hangout for seals and sea lions. In case you have ever wondered about the difference between seals and sea lions, seals are pictured below. They have the short flippers which are sort of useless on land. Seals move around land by awkwardly flopping their bodies. Sea lions are two photos down. They have the big flippers that they can perch on and use to walk around. Thanks to our Seal tour on the first day of our trip, we are now proficient in identifying seals vs. sea lions.
Next we walked to Boomer Beach. There isn't any swimming allowed there, but Nina and Addie especially had a ball checking out all the rocks and caves. This was when I was really missing my poor dead-battery dSLR camera. Sigh.
This place is just breathtakingly gorgeous.
When Nina found this rock, she couldn't resist doing her best Ariel pose from the Little Mermaid. It's the perfect rock, right?
Our last coastal stop in La Jolla was La Jolla Cove which we all loved. We were greeted by a sun bathing sea lion hanging out right next to the beach.
The water was a bit chilly, but it was so clear and beautiful.
If I were to visit La Jolla Cove again, I would rent snorkel gear. We just used the goggles we brought from home, and that proved sufficient for the girls that day. They kept popping up squealing about all the different types of fish they were seeing. There were lots of people snorkeling though... definitely a great spot for that.
Our whole morning in La Jolla was just fabulous. It is a beautiful place to visit. When it came time for lunch, as we were quickly discovering in all of Southern California, parking is a premium. Although I had names of several recommended restaurants for lunch in La Jolla, we ended up just going with the approach of "find an empty parking space, and then wander around from there looking at menus" to find a spot for lunch. That was much less headache-inducing than attempting to choose a restaurant first and then find parking. We ended up at Wahoo's, a little fish taco joint, for lunch. That was pretty good.
Our next stop for the day was a bit of a disappointment. We headed up to the Torrey Pines Gliderport. The U.S. Nationals Paragliding competition was going on that week, so we were sure we'd see all sorts of great paragliding and hang gliding. I've heard it is extremely cool to watch the gliders take off and land. Unfortunately, gliding requires wind. Picky, those paragliders are. We managed to land there on an afternoon with no wind.
We had fun wandering around, checking out the cliffs, imagining what it must be like to see the gliders, and crossing our fingers for wind.
Alas, wind just wasn't in the cards for us that day. I'll definitely head back to the gliderport if I'm ever in that area again though.
Our last stop for the day was a Target in San Diego where we were all highly amused and intrigued by the cart escalator. We're easily entertained, apparently.
Despite the gliderless gliderport, our La Jolla day was a big hit.
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