Paint night

As a Christmas present, Chelsey and I got to try our hand at "social painting". This is an event where an artist leads a group of people at a restaurant or bar and teaches them how to paint a certain painting. We chose one that was an underwater scene of a turtle. It was quite a lot of fun, and I think we both felt like we did better than we thought we would at the painting. Of course, now that we have it home, I think I needed to do a bit better. Here's both of our efforts - maybe you can guess who did which one:

bocce

In early June (last year) we got some visitors when our friends Matt and Tara came over to visit from Phoenix.We had a nice weekend showing them around San Diego. On Sunday we took them for breakfast at our favourite place, then we went over to Coronado to play some bocce ball in Tidelands Park. I got Chelsey a bocce set for her birthday; the pictures here are from our inaugural game with each other on the Chula Vista bayfront.

Amazingly, we somehow neglected to take pictures while they were here. In addition to bocce, we also took them to the zoo. It was a lot of fun; we really enjoyed the monkeys on that trip. Since we lacked pictures, though, I asked Chelsey to use some Photoshop skills to recreate something. I'm pretty sure our zoo trip looked pretty much like this:

Angels game

Another event from 2 summers ago! We've had a bunch of half-finished blog posts sitting in the queue for months (maybe, at this point, years) and we're finally clearing them all out.

Texas

Back in June (last year!) we took a trip to Texas with Chelsey's family. After a long drive we spent a few days at Josie and Drew's house. It was a busy, event-filled time. We had morning baseball games in the vacant lot next door, afternoon swimming, board games and tennis. There was also, I think, a Wii bowling tournament, but my memory of that seems to be as short as my actual stay in the tourney.

Following all that we traveled down near San Antonio for a sojourn at Schlitterbahn. It's reputed to be the best water park in the country, and although I don't have many points of comparison, I was impressed. There are two separate areas of the park - the original and the new. The new side featured a water slide called Master Blaster, which was apparently voted the best water ride in the nation. Again, my frame of reference is limited, but it was a good ride. It was also very popular, so I only rode it once due to the long lines. This side of the park also had a loop river ride. It had an acqua conveyor belt, which lifted you and your inner tube up to the top of the ride, then you rode down through some rapids before floating back around to the belt. I really enjoyed this one and probably could have ridden it around and around and around.

Despite those good rides, I liked the original side of the park more. There were several (not so) lazy river rides, which was my favourite type (and generally had short or no lines). Most of these also ended by dumping you straight into the Comal River, which I also thought was a lot of fun.
-Jason

Mission Bay Boat cruise

One of the resort hotels in Mission Bay has an old paddle-wheel boat that they use to cruise around the Bay. The cruise is free for hotel guests but the public can buy tickets too. Chelsey and I took a little bay cruise on the boat. It was nice to be on the water at night. We tried to time it so we were on the boat during the SeaWorld fireworks, but they must have changed their schedule because we didn't get to see them.
-Jason

OTL

Over the Line is a modified version of softball with three-person teams that is native to San Diego. It's usually played on the beach, as befits a San Diego sport, but it's become best-known for the annual World Championship played on Fiesta Island in Mission Bay. The championships are infamous not so much for the competition but for the party atmosphere and Mardi Gras-like festivities that take place. Last year Chelsey and I went, with a little trepidation, to check it out. We rode our bikes around the bay and the island, then went in to see some action. It was actually a little tamer than we had feared/expected; some of the team names were quite graphic, but they were mostly background noise and easily ignored. The most visible sign of the tournament's reputation was a golf cart that had been decorated to resemble a male body part - complete with a water gun to squirt out of the front. Classy.

We also watched some of the action, which was fun, but it mostly seemed like an excuse to drink beer in the sun.
-Jason

Olvera Street

Last summer I combined two things I've been wanting to do - ride the train up to LA and go to Olvera Street. The latter is the birthplace of Los Angeles, the site of the original town. It's now a little civic square and a pedestrian shopping street. It's supposed to be like a Mexican market. We were a little disappointed in it, though. it's not very big, and it's mostly cheap tourist stuff - the market stalls weren't that interesting to browse through.

The train ride up was better. The section from San Diego into Orange County is a beautiful ride, right on the coast, as I think we've described on the blog before. So that is always enjoyable.
-Jason