Honeymoon Day 2 - Serenades and ships and minivans, oh my!

Our 2nd day was full of plenty of fun and adventure. We woke up to the sounds of the waves breaking on the beach just outside our window...such an amazing sound! The rest of the day was filled with checking out Old Town San Diego, visiting the Midway, checking out the Gaslamp quarter, and finishing off the day renting a minivan. Yep, you read that right...a minivan.

We started the adventure chasing down the city bus to get to Old Town. We had gone to 7-11 to get some change and were just heading toward the stop when we saw the bus arriving at the stop a block and a half away. It wasn't a good day to have decided to wear a skirt and sandals and I'm sure I was looking pretty goofy trying to run down the road. We made it to the bus and began the trek to Old Town. When we arrived at the transit station, we looked around and realized we had no idea where we were. We finally got directions and made our way into Old Town. Very cool little area. The first part of it contained a bunch of buildings set up museum-style so we could see how things were done before the turn of the century. All I can say is I'm glad we have nice comfy chairs and novocaine shots for dental work today. The tools looked like woodworking tools, not dental tools.

We headed into a candle shop and saw that we could dip our own candles. They had taper candles and other shapes of animals available to dip into various colors of wax. Here are our candles after they were dipped and glazed.

Candles: Our beautiful candles.

We continued to wander around and walked into the Catholic church for a quick prayer and then some pictures. It was a beautiful building with a gorgeous garden area.

Inside the church.

The garden in the church courtyard.

As we were walking, we realized we were really needing something to eat, so we stopped at the Old Town Mexican Cafe for lunch. It was awesome! As we walked in, there were 3 women making corn and flour tortillas. The tortillas were delicious. We ordered a meal and as we were waiting, a man came by to serenade us. I have no idea what the song was about, but he did admit it wasn't necessarily a romantic song. It had a cool melody and rhythm, though.

He's singing to me!

After lunch, we hopped on the tour bus and made our way to the USS Midway. That ship is huge! We got to tour pretty much the entire ship, including the crew's sleeping quarters and the control rooms. Just in the small amount of time we were in there, I was feeling a bit claustrophobic, so I can't even imagine how it must be to be on those ships for months at a time. We also got to check out all the planes and I learned how they catapult them off the flight deck...it's a pretty complicated process. Here are a couple pics of Jeremy with one of the planes and one of the ship.

Jeremy and one of the planes.

A small part of the ship.

After the ship tour, we took the tour bus to the Gaslamp Quarter, which is a great part of town with a ton of little shops, cafes, and clubs. The highlight of the area that day was the ice cream sundae at the Ghiradelli shop. Yummy.

The yummy sundae.

We also wandered into Horton Plaza, which is a maze of a mall with open air walkways. We did a little shopping and ended up with a couple bags of goods. After that, we met up with Matt, Kelli, and Mariah for some dinner at the Yard House restaurant. After dinner, we headed back to the rental car district at the airport. Unfortunately, we were visiting San Diego during a huge "geek" convention, SPIE (I know all the Micron guys know what this is). The problem with a huge convention in town is that the rental car companies were sold out of the cheap vehicles. We ended up getting a ride from some guy that the National rental car place had called. We had no idea where we were going and both of us were thinking we could have been on our way to be killed and left for the fishies. Luckily, we ended up at some tiny mom-and-pop rental car place and had the opportunity to rent the last minivan in the entire city of San Diego. Romantic, huh? Guess God is trying to prepare us for the inevitable. With all that adventure the 2nd day, how could we possibly have any more excitement?! Day 3 is on the way!