*A nice short one for you to make up for the last one!*

Okay blog fans, sadly no pictures of San Diego so you're stuck with the old LA one, but never mind. "What've we been up to??" I hear you cry...

Well, we sadly left the Stalboerger's residence in LA. Joan and Eric were such good hosts to us, and we certainly wouldn't have appreciated LA as much had we not stayed with them. We are looking forward to returning to LA the day before our flight out to spend some more time with them.

The drive to San Diego went very smoothly, as driving on the 'wrong' side is going so far. That is to say except for one small hiccup when after pulling out of a gas station - you really have to adopt the Americanisms while you're here (I even pronounced tomatoes, tomaytoes the other day!) - I turned onto the left side of the road. Oops! Fortunately there were no other cars around, so as soon as I realised my error, thanks mostly to Cooper's screams of "Get to the right, get to the RIGHT!!!", I steered back to the right-hand side!

On arrival in San Diego, with no reservations, we had our GPS (who we've named named Angela after 'Los Angeles') take us to a road called 'Hotel Circle'. It does exactly what it says on the tin! Perfect for the lazy tourist. After carefully selecting from the many hotels along the road, we started planning our next two days that we'd spend in San Diego!

For day one we decided upon Sea World! On arrival, we spent some time petting dolphins and sting rays, these are but a few species among a plethora of aquatic life spread around the park. However, the main attraction are the resident Orca, or Killer Whales! Currently there are seven at Sea World and three times a day a show is put on featuring some of them. These are hard working Killer Whales! The most famous of which, Shamu is famous for his film work in 'Free Willy'!

The show was spectacular! The animals are so clever and the trainers obviously are too! It's always lovely to see animals in the wild (although I'm not sure how true that is when they have 'killer' in their name) but when you see how intelligently they interact with humans, it's plain to see that they're happy in their environment, not least because many of them have never known any better!

We watched as the Orca jumped and flipped in and out of the water, performing impeccably with their trainers who would dive with them, surf on them or simply be pushed along by them. It really was a spectacular show. So good in fact, that we returned for the second show of the day!

Besides the animals at Sea World, there are a couple of rides, and we got thoroughly soaked on them, but even better than the rides themselves were water cannons which you could pay to use, and fire on the people on the rides! Brilliant, and a couple of bucks well spent in my opinion!

The next day was time for San Diego Zoo - the one Melman the Giraffe in Madagascar wants to go to! It seems San Diego tourist attractions are VERY popular with film stars!

There were lots of excellent animals there, lions, tigers, bears...among many others. I think the best were the Giant Pandas and the other Bears...all of them as they're all dead cute. Surprise of the day was how playful the Rhinos were, we watched as they chased each other through their enclosure. Please note, there were NO penguins at the zoo, otherwise of course they'd have taken the number one spot!

We didn't need all day to explore the zoo, so we headed into town in the afternoon to see what San Diego looks like outside the tourist attractions. We walked along the harbour and then drove in to the city for a look in the Gaslamp Quarter. It was a lovely little spot and we wished we had longer to explore, however we didn't and the next day we'd be heading to Vegas!