Walking Around San Diego

Second Full Day In San Diego – What happened.

Ok, this is our last full day in San Diego. We decided to skip breakfast this morning and walked down towards the Maritime Museum to catch the trolley bus — a hop-on, hop-off trolley that takes in about 25 miles around San Diego and Coronado. Another extortionate price, but we’ve now realised that if we refused to do things based on price, we’d probably end up homeless and hungry!

So we jumped onboard and started taking in the sights. The first part of the route felt very familiar as we realised we’d already walked around most of it over the past few days. But once we drove over the bridge towards Coronado, it felt like we had entered a completely different chapter.

Wow! Coronado — which actually isn’t part of San Diego but its own city — is amazing. It’s very swish and fancy and just looks immaculate. Strangely it almost feels quite new, even though there are some very old buildings. Apparently a few of them were even physically moved there by boat, which sounds mad but makes for a good story.

We had a lovely wander around the Hotel del Coronado, a very famous hotel with loads of history attached to it. From there we walked through the hotel towards the beach, which was absolutely beautiful. Naturally, we decided this was the perfect place to stop for a drink at a little beach bar — benches, plastic cups, you know the sort of place.

Then came the shock… $35 for one beer and a Bacardi and Coke! OMG, this place is insane. I know I keep mentioning how expensive things are here, but this one really did take the biscuit.

After that little financial shock we walked back to the trolley stop and caught the trolley back towards Old Town, which is stop number one. We had about 20 minutes to wander around, but it was mostly tourist tat, so we decided to jump back on and wait for our next driver, Jack.

Jack was actually the third driver we’d had on the trolley that day, but he was by far the most entertaining. He had everyone introducing themselves to the rest of the passengers and even got us all shouting “Oorah!” as we drove past the naval base.

We hopped off again at stop four, the Seaport stop, and walked over to Kansas City Barbeque. We would never have known about this place if our very first trolley driver, James, hadn’t told us that it’s where they filmed the famous bar scene in the first Top Gun movie — so of course we had to go and see it.

It turned out to be a great decision because we ended up having some of the best brisket and pulled pork we’ve had in ages. Naturally, we took plenty of photos while we were there.

After reminiscing about Top Gun for a bit, we wandered back to the hotel to freshen up. Today is a big arrival day for cruise guests ahead of tomorrow’s departure, so we headed down to the bar. It was definitely much busier than usual. But the atmosphere was a lttle low key we were thinking there would be a real buzz but hey ho.

Either way, we’re far too excited to worry about any of that. We had a few drinks, then headed back to the room.

Our cases are being picked up directly from the room at 8am tomorrow, which is brilliant, and the bus leaves at 11:30 to take us to our wonderful ship, Vista, and the start of this long-awaited adventure.