San Diego

Cody goes down to San Diego about once a month for work, so Ella and I decided to join him for this trip and get a little vacation!  We stayed in the Gas Lamp Quarter which was perfect for Ella and I to walk to all the cute shops, restaurants, parks, and to take daily trips to Pinkberry while Cody was at work.  We managed to pack a lot in to each day and had beautiful weather the whole time.  Ella was a good little traveler on the plane and in the hotel - the only hard part was that our hotel was right by the train that ran through the day and night and the conductor liked to let everyone know he was coming through (especially at midnight, 2am, 4am, etc.).  Our poor baby woke up multiple times each night startled by the loud train horns and had a tough time going back to sleep.  As with all of our trips, we probably took over a thousand pictures so this post is very picture heavy as I wanted to make sure all of our fun memories make it in our blog book.

We stopped by Ghiradelli's ice cream and let Ella have her first taste of ice cream :).  No surprise that she loved it!

 Ella and I enjoyed some pool time at the hotel.  I even got to sneak away to spend an hour at the pool by myself each morning while Ella napped thanks to our baby video monitor :).

 She also worked on perfecting her crawl in the hotel room.  She is all of a sudden all over the place and into everything!

We enjoyed an amazing dinner at the Hotel del Coronado with a beautiful ocean view. 

Ella entertained us (and everyone around us) during dinner with her always expressive self!

Good morning San Diego!

Best bed head.  Ever.

Ella and I walked to Seaport Village one day and enjoyed checking out the cute shops and having a picnic lunch by the water.

After Cody had gotten off work, we had planned on heading to the beach for an afternoon when on the way, our rental car broke down.  The engine turned off and we had to restart it about 10 times within a mile before it wouldn't restart at all.  We found a place to pull off in Coronado and had to call a tow truck to bring us a new car.  It took a few hours for the tow truck and new car to get to us through Friday afternoon traffic.  We made the best of it by walking to a Starbucks and the Village Pizzeria for dinner (which turned out to be one of our favorite places we ate at!).  

This happy girl went with the flow and didn't even know our plans had been altered :).

So our afternoon at the beach turned into a relatively quick visit before the sun went down, but we loved seeing Ella feel (and taste!) the sand and get her feet wet in the ocean water. 

 Practicing her yoga moves ;)

 Not too sure about this sandy stuff.

We spent all day Saturday at the San Diego Zoo!  It is a a huge zoo and despite the crowds and the heat we had such a fun time exploring the zoo and seeing the animals.  Ella was fascinated by some of the bigger animals like the polar bears, giraffes, gorillas, elephants, and rhinoceros'.

 The one thing we waited in line to see were the panda bears as we had never seen them in person before. Very cute!

 They take a picture while you're waiting in line and yes, we are those tourists who bought the cheesy souvenir picture :).  In all fairness, it's one of the only pictures of all three of us from our trip and Ella was actually looking at the camera so we figured it was worth it.

 Ella checking out the orangutangs.

 Pit stop for lunch for this tired girl!

 Napping in the ergo baby.

We were able to see the giraffes really close-up.  There was even a cute baby giraffe you can see laying down.

On our final night we went to La Jolla for dinner, gelato, and a walk down by the water.  A perfect ending to a great trip!