Wednesday was an intentional lazy day: our last full day in California before I started dictating when alarms would be set for the road trip section of the holiday! A lazy morning meant the perfect time to do a little laundry before being on the move. However, we discovered that things don't dry on the Californian coast. You can leave things hanging on the balcony in 75 degree heat and when you get home it's still damp due to the humidity in the air! For our day...

We took full advantage of our beachfront apartment on Tuesday morning: All the locals were already off being busy with their day jobs as we awoke nice and early (we still haven't fully adjusted to the -8 hour time difference and tend to wake naturally at 6:30). On the full stretch of beach between Oceanside pier and harbour there were one or two families, a couple of lone book readers and a gaggle of early bird surfers about fifty meters out. We set up camp watch...

Did you know that for every foot of giraffe, it's tongue is that long in inches? Yes, we went to San Diego Zoo. The place is absolutely enormous! Spread across multiple levels and an absurd amount of hectares, it took constant reference to the zoo map to find our way from tiger to panda to koala and back to refreshments. In all, it was a bit of a rush around and three days would probably be required to do the centre justice. There was lots of information about ea...

Sunday was dominated by a trip to see a focal point of American culture: an NFL game. The San Diego Chargers were playing divisional rivals the Kansas City Chiefs in only the third game of the season (Sand Diego having won the first two, Kansas City having lost the first two). We got up in what we thought was plenty time to get to the 1:30pm kick-off -- the stadium is only a 40 minute drive from our apartment. However, a quick check on the Chargers web-site for ...

Saturday was our first real day in California and started early. Thanks to the 8-hour time difference we were both wide eyed and ready to start our day at 5:00am. Unfortunately the hotel breakfast didn't start until 6:30am. We couldn't see the Pacific Ocean from our hotel window due to the thick morning fog so, after checking out, we decided to head down to the front to get our first glimpse of the ocean. Although it was still early, there were plenty of folk ou...