Stay classy San Diego

Next up is San Diego. A sunny beachside city located in Southern California, right on the border of Mexico. There isn't too much to San Diego, its a pretty simple city, with only a few places to keep one occupied. Most notably, those include the world famous San Deigo Zoo, and the plethora of beaches. And while that may not sound like a lot, they do both very well. To start with, the San Diego Zoo, which is world famous for a reason. Honestly, you could spend 3 or 4 days in the Zoo and just see it all. To help you understand the scale of the Zoo, there is a chairlift that transports you from one side to the other, because it is just unrealistic to walk from one end to the other in one day. Then there are the beaches, which line the southern California coast, each better than the last. So as it turns out, it was a good idea to splash out and ride the Amtrak down, because amazingly the tracks are actually on the beach, so grand views were to be had.

Our first ever Amtrak train nearly 3 and a half months into the trip.

This is a picture of some of the amazing scenery from the train from LA to San Diego. As mentioned before, the train ran along the beach the entire way to San Diego, it was just stunning.

A couple of old Spanish missions (churches) on the way from our place to the Zoo.

GIANT TURTLES!

FIIIGHT!

We made a friend in the turtle enclosure.

Yes the zoo has Polar bears.

This was the chairlift or skyfari as its known to get to either side of the ginormous zoo.

View from the Skyfari

Turns out polar bears love carrot.... who knew.

Reindeer.

As it turns out the zoo have some pandas,  which were pretty cute but sound  asleep when we visited. Anyway you can see the mum sound asleep on the rock and the baby asleep up in the tree.

A closer up view of the cute panda cub asleep in the tree.

Daddy panda passed out on the ground snoring away.

Hippo close up.

We make pretty attractive monkeys, what do you think?

These monkeys would fight for 5 minutes, run away, than fight again for another 5 minutes. We ended up watching their shenanigans for about half an hour. 

Orangutan. 

Just lions sleeping like dogs.

Elephant. 

As it turns out, the San Diego Zoo had more Koala's than Australia. And they were all incredibly lively. 

We found the culprit that left that dirty great mess. He came back for a second sniff. 

Christmas lights in the Zoo.

The next day we headed down to Mission Beach, one of the more popular beaches in San Diego. It had a few restaurants, arcades and amusement rides to keep the kids in all of us happy. 

Mini golfing never ever gets old. 

The sunset at Mission Beach

Just thought we'd leave you with this image imprinted in your minds, our lovely faces. 

So that was San Diego, a nice beachside stop on our voyage across America, and much enjoyed. The next stop on our trip is Los Angeles, which I imagine will come in a few posts to help split up our time in Hollywood, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills.

So until then,
Kristian & Lauren.