Socal

At the end of May, shortly after my graduation, we took a week-long family vacation to Southern California. It was our first real vacation since our trip to Hawaii, more than a year and a half ago. My parents, who had been staying with us since my graduation, drove down ahead of time with a car-full of Ruby's gear. The three of us flew down a couple days later, taking advantage of the last time Ruby would be able to fly for free.

Our first stop was in LA, where we visited my cousin Hao-hao, who had also recently graduated from the prestigious Art Center College of Design. We stayed on the East side of LA near his house, which is not the most glamorous part of LA but has the best Asian food that I've ever tasted in the U.S. In fact every time we go, I feel like I've returned to China.

Ruby was very happy to be reacquainted with her Uncle Hao-hao.



However, she was less sure about his very friendly doggie, Lancelot.



While she took a great interest in him from afar, whenever she was approached, she would burst into tears and run for Mommy.



Ruby slowly warmed up to the doggie and got to the point where she liked to feed him treats. However, she would hesitate at the last moment and drop the treat on the floor instead of putting it into his mouth.



While in LA we also had the chance to visit Kidspace Children's Museum, which seemed to be the LA-equivalent of our Bay Area Discovery Museum. Ruby's favorite part of the museum was the area by the cafeteria where water shot out of the ground. She thought that the water was dancing, so she went ahead and danced along.



After 3 days in LA, we drove down to San Diego. We had envisioned a warm and sunny San Diego vacation filled with days at the beach, but the weather during our stay was not much warmer than San Francisco temperatures. In fact, our first day in San Diego was overcast with intermittent showers (one of the maybe 5 days a year San Diego sees rain). Fortunately, we were able to enjoy Sea World anyways.







The next day we went the the San Diego Zoo, and saw the real-life version of Ruby's halloween costume.





The San Diego Zoo is much larger than the San Francisco Zoo, and after hours of walking, we were all very tired and in need of an ice cream break.







Ruby loved Sea World so much that we returned the following day.









In the end, we were only able to make one visit to the beach, even though it was just walking distance from our hotel. It was a bit cold, but still beautiful and a nice end to our Southern California vacation.