Good Morning!

I am currently sitting in the Newark airport, trying to keep my eyes open. I had a red-eye flight from Santa Ana, CA that landed here at 4:50 am. My flight to Hartford isn’t until 8:05. I had a hearty breakfast, even though I wasn’t really hungry. I figured it might jump start my body into comprehending that it’s a new day.

There is a lot to post about my trip to California! I meant to do daily updates, or at least a couple of updates while I was out there, but as you can see, I did not.

Instead, I spent pretty much every evening on the beach, watching the sun go down and the seagulls and plovers and surfers all doing their thing. Then I would go back to my room and eat dinner. And… I got caught up watching Fuller House. I guess nostalgia really gets ahold of me. I loved Full House when I was a kid so seeing all the same characters return as adults was fun. And honestly, the show was making me laugh a lot.

Ok, so to sum up my California experience:

I flew into San Diego last Sunday. I quickly picked up my rental car (a Ford Fiesta, which was not nearly as much fun to drive as the name would suggest) and headed up to Solana Beach. The first thing I noticed, aside from all the palm trees, was how wide the highway (sorry – freeway) was. And everyone drives so fast! I never did figure out what the speed limit was, but I was going over 70 and cars were flying past me like I was a turtle.

Solana Beach was beautiful. I stayed at the Courtyard Marriott, which I wasn’t all that impressed with at first, but it grew on me as the week went by. I liked that everything was walkable. The office where I was doing my training was only about a mile from the hotel. Each day we would just walk to a restaurant for lunch. There was only one other person in the training class – a woman from New Jersey named Nanci. She was very nice, so we went to lunch together each day and even to dinner one night.

Each day after the class, I went back to the hotel and did a little work. Then I would head to the beach, watch the sunset and come back. I can never eat very much food in one sitting, so most nights I just had leftovers for dinner. It probably sounds lame, but I also hate eating in restaurants by myself. It’s like eating alone in the school cafeteria. It’s not so bad at an airport, because a lot of people are traveling alone, but in a regular restaurant everyone’s either on a date or dining with friends or family. So it’s weird.

On Friday, there was no training, so I worked in my hotel room. It was pretty agonizing because I really wanted to go out and explore. But I managed to get caught up on a bunch of stuff and then I let myself go play.

I decided to check out Torrey Pines State Park. It was a short drive from Solana Beach. Here are some of the pics I took that day.

It was really neat to see what the natural landscape of the coast looks like. It seems like everywhere else is built up with fancy houses or resorts. To see just how fragile the landscape is was a bit unnerving. These sandstone cliffs aren’t exactly the most stable.