Hi everyone.
My first TR and unlike most of the interesting trip reports here this one not some trip around the world or even another continent, just a short trip to San Diego for a few days.
Just writing it up for my own diary and sharing it here if anyone wants to read it, and maybe get ideas how to spend the day there.
Pardon my typos (and grammer).
I booked a non-stop flight for both of us with JetBlue on Sunday 9:55am from JFK, paid with TrueBlue points 11k per ticket per way, packed most of the food needed for the trip to be on the safe side and not have to go shopping there, as we arrived at the airport i got a notification that our flight is being delayed with 20 minutes, nothing out of the ordinary, a few minutes later I received another notification that our flight is being diverted, at that moment I thought they're referring to the gate number which they changed.
As always when flying JetBlue I don't choose seats so if it's a full flight I'm usually lucky to be placed in the front rows at the even more space seats without paying extra, We took off at 10:55am instead of 9:55am, after about four and a half hours into the flight the pilot came on the PA and announced we will be landing shortly in Las Vegas!!! for a short stop to refuel and will soon be back in the air to SAN, That came as a bit of a shock to me and only then a checked the previous notification again and noticed the diversion was referring to LAS, I never heard of a such a thing making a stop with a none-stop flight for refueling, I can't say I didn't mind the stop as according to the original plan we were supposed to land in SAN about 1:15 and I made some plans how to spend the afternoon in San Diego, but I thought it's only a short stop and we will get to SAN only an hour late.
But that wasn't the case, after landing we taxied to one terminal and after 20 minutes the pilot announced that we have to drive (is that how they call it?...) to the other end of the airport to pick up the fuel there (i guess he was looking for a cheaper gas station...) we ended up spending two full hours on the ground in LAS, surprisingly most ppl on the plane were really calm, the person behind me kept on telling me that the crew should give out free drinks to compensate the diversion (had he been a ddf'r he would know you can get a lot more than just free drinks), finally we took off and after a short but rough flight (sounded like the pilot was speeding rushing to make up the lost time) we landed in SAN on 4:20pm.
I booked my car at Avis (overpaid by mistake shhh) for a premium, got a Lincoln MKZ pretty cool car and off to our hotel we went, not really it was just a 2 min drive, we stayed at the Shereton Hotel Spa & Marina next to the airport (10k spg a night), the hotel charges $29 for self parking and $34 for valet parking, I chose valet, checked in, got an upgrade to higher floor, settled in our room, got a fridge and microwave upon request and ate dinner, went down to check out the property and that was it for the night, after a sleepless night before and a long crazy flight I was dead so went to sleep early.
Monday morning I got up early and drove to downtown for Shachris at Chabad, took me a few minutes to find it because its hidden behind a storefront for Segway Tours, as I opened the door to enter a local guy came up to me and told me that the minyen had moved to someone's house due to their sitting Shiva and asked me if I can come join the the minyen there, we drove about 20 min up to La Jolla we were the last 2 ppl to make up for a full minyen, after shachris the Rabbi announced that we will continue the minyen here at the Shiva house untill Wednesday.
Went back to the hotel, ate some breakfast and went out for the day.
First we went to old town San Diego, its where the first settlers of San Diego lived, quit nice and interesting, full of small Mexican style shops, and unlike other gift shops I found it not be expensive at all, spent there about 2 hours, after that we went USS Midway (forgot to mention I bought the Costco Go-Card which has most attractions included) spend there about 5 hours, unrolled closing which is 5 o'clock, it was quite interesting but very similer to the Intrepid.
After that we drove over to Coronado island and stopped at the old beautiful Hotel Del Coronado, from the beach behind the hotel we watched sunset which was really beautiful, after nightfall we went back to our hotel for dinner, went out for some shopping and end of day.
Tuesday, after shachris and breakfast we started off at Balboa Park, the parking is very big you can spend more then a day there, first you have the San Diego Zoo and then there are many museums such as Air & Space museum, natural history museum, science museum, art museums and more, the itself is really nice with beautiful architecture and gardens, we didn't go to the Zoo as we planned to spend a day at the Safari instead so we toured some of the museums (every museum has an extra entrance fee but we had it included in our Go Card pass) walked around the park it's really an amazing piece of art.
After that we went to seaport village and spent some time at the water, after that we drove down south to the border, as you get close to the border the traffic gets real heavy with police patrol everywhere it was even heavier but we squeezed into a parking lot right next to the border, we crossed the border by foot nobody asks for your passport or anything, as you get out of the building there is one question you hear from each and every person twice "Taxi? Taxi?" That's all you hear as you walk down the next 2 blocks, we didn't know the area (of course not) and it was late afternoon and didn't want to be there when it gets dark so we just walked around checking out the place that creates our workforce from back home, walked around about 45 minutes, bought a few small items in the shops and went back, people told us here on DDF and heard the same from locals that the wait time to get back to the US can be an hour or two but surprisingly it tooknus only 10 minutes.
Went back to our car and drove all the way up to LA Jolla, even we had enough food we decided to check out the kosher shops in LA Jolla, first we went to The Place at JCC, ate dinner there, then we went to Ralph's I'm LA Jolla and were surprised to see 3 full aisles kosher food, a kosher deli, kosher bakery products and even kosher sushi, picked up some wine and liquor and went back to our hotel for the night.
Wednesday started off the same as the previous days, we spent the full day in Sea World and had a great time, some of the rides and the Dolphin Stadium were closed so we missed that but otherwise it was Sea World, dinner at Ralph's, some shopping around at Horten Plaza I'm downtown (damn we did a lot of window shopping these few days...)
Thursday morning last day of our trip, this time shachris was at Chabad downtown, packed up our stuff, checked out of the hotel and drove up to the Safari, it wasn't what I expected, the park is very big so you need to do a lot of walking from one animal to the other and the animals were quite sleepy, though we still enjoyed it spent quite a few hours, afterwards we went to LA Jolla Cove where you have the seals on the beach walking and swimming around with the ppl, was quite interesting, did some walking around, went to Ralph's and bought dinner, off to the airport we went, checked in, went to UA Club lounge ate dinner there and boarded the plane 8:30pm.
If you read up to here, Tnx.