Karol Kaczmarek

After visiting Santa Monica Beach in the morning we set out to San Diego. On our way we saw, as usually, really wide freeways and.. signs that Halloween is coming .

It took us less than 3 hours to see first views of beautiful skyline of San Diego.

Firstly we drove to the Coronado island to see the U.S. Navy museum. At least this is what Czarek claimed it to be. We got to the right place, however the view of armed men and control points on the road made us a little bit suspicious. Anyway, we waited in the line and after few minutes one of the guards informed us that it’s not a museum, but the main naval military station and that all people are not stoping there to buy tickets, but to show the permission to enter . Obviously we didn’t have any, tough luck  

Instead of the “museum” we visited the very adorable island.

In the evening we checked in to the hotel which was very close to the Petco Field (baseball stadium).

We had very hard time finding some place to park our car, cause there was a game played on that day and most of parkings were either full or highly overpriced.

San Diego has the most radiculous parking system I have ever seen! You pay like 10-20$ for 9 hours of parking and you can’t pay for a longer time in advance. If you pay at 8pm and want to stay till e.g. 3pm next day they expect you to come in the middle of the night to pay fee for next 9 hours! Ridiculous, but this is how it really works! We thought that it’s reasonable to be able to pay in advance and paid for 18 hours. In the morning we found a nice white slip imitating the official ticket (but it really wasn’t official!). It had also yellow envelope attached to send the check as soon as possible. It was private parking owned by the company Parking of America and after reading reviews in the internet I found out that they cheat people very often giving them tickets e.g. within 3 hours of paying.

As far as nice San Diego is, parking there is really pain in the ass. And it’s not the problem with us who didn’t get it at the beginning, during just one hour I saw three vehicles towed away! Even after parking properly it may occur that there is street cleaning during that night and you will be towed away anyway So lovely! Good luck we just got a ticket

In SD we’ve  been staying right in the middle of the historical Gaslamp Quarter which is also the party district of the city.

I’m not sure how much the number of people there that night was impacted by the game, but the pavements were totally cram packed with people (it was saturday, but on sunday it was still quite full)! So many restaurants, bars and clubs in one place makes the district extremely lively by night and SD seems to be even bigger than it is. San Francisco and Los Angeles seem to have everything spread out a little bit more. Unfortunately I didn’t make photos during a night, but this is how it looks during a day Just imagine people everywhere, change color of sky to black, add few englighted “gas” lamps (electric-powered) and you have it by night! .

Apart from the old buildings, there is also of course a lot of modern constructions in the area near there… mixed with palms growing everywhere . That’s funny that we find beautiful something which for other people (from hotter countries in this case) is totally normal. They would probably see an oak and find it much more appealing that palms – exotic .

as well as place called sea village with tons of small restaurants and gift shops. Pleasant area to stoll around.

After a bit of walking in the city we went to the USS Midway, the aircraft turned into museum. Finally! We were able to go to the museum this time!

After that I met with my friend Magda living in San Diego to talk a bit. She was reallysurprised we didn’t go to any beaches yet. True, San Diego is famous of it’s b eaches, so we couldn’t leave it without going to any. To fix this little issue, the next morning before setting out to Las Vegas, we drove to pretty Pacific Beach (unfortunately not to swim, water was quite cold as usually in Pacific ).