Celebrating Christmas in San Diego

Buenos dias! As you can see, uploading Peru footage has been slow... sorting through 7,000 pictures and ??GBs of video is daunting and the holidays have us in a very laid back mood. We meant to do some serious sorting through Peru pix last weekend but we got caught up in our Christmas'ing! On Friday, it took me 3 hours to get to San Diego. It was raining and I had left LA at 4:15pm. I was tired from the drive and not in the mood to cook so we picked up DiGiorno and White Castle sliders. Ignas added fresh bell peppers and mushrooms to the pizza and it came out very yummy.

Kate O Sessions Memorial Park

For breakfast, we ate pumpkin bread and cream cheese spread that I had made earlier in the week (delicious!). Then, we made our way to Kate O Sessions park. The sky was beautiful, the clouds were fluffy and the air was crisp... just a typical December day in San Diego :)

I'm fascinated by how scary I look. Jumping picture fail.

Next, we headed over to Ocean Beach to walk around and eat. We took pictures and ate lunch at Hodad's, which claims to have the World's Best Burger. It was pretty damn good. We got a single bacon cheeseburger (YUM), a chocolate malt (soo good), fries (amazing), tuna sandwich (meh). While walking around town, we stopped by two stores that were exactly me and Ignas. The first store was a seashell/ocean-decor store - Ignas was in love. He bought a few sea stars and some other beach stuff. He was inspired to decorate his apt more after hanging out in there. Then.. we passed by an old school video game store!! Oh my goodness, they had Atari and a classic NES, a SNES, Sega Genesis, Gamecube, Dreamcast, N64, Xbox, arcade machines... I didn't want to leave. So nostalgic being in there! On the other hand, Ignas was more entertained by my excitement than anything in the store haha.

Our first time ice skating together!

Saturday evening was spent walking around Coronado, cooking Christmas dinner, and watching Christmas movies! For dinner, we made lasagna (the best lasagna I've ever had) and beef stew. The first thing we did on Sunday was head over to Best Buy to pick up a new cell phone for Ignas. It took forever and I got antsy so Ignas agreed to go ice skating next. I found one of those holiday-outdoor rinks in Gaslamp and it was so much fun! It was cold and drizzling but that added to the holiday spirit! We headed over to Cremolose for dessert, snacks, and tea. Then, we made our way to the USS Miday to watch the San Diego Bay boat parade! After, we drove to Clairemont and walked through a neighborhood decked out in Christmas lights.

Click here for more pictures from our Christmas weekend! Feliz Navidad!

P.S.
So up until now, we haven't been adding captions to the pictures in our photo gallery but I think for 2013, we'll be putting them in. Actually, I already started with the pictures from our San Diego Christmas :)

Peru Itinerary

The first blog I wanted to write when I got back home was our itinerary. I planned on creating a similar map to the one I made for the Costa Rica itinerary. But let's be honest, my work in Adobe Acrobat isn't that cool. I figured that there has to be some kind of itinerary/map-maker somewhere on the internet... and voila! I stumbled upon Tripline.

Tripline is basically an interactive map. I've only spent about half an hour playing with it but so far, it's awesome. Check out the itinerary I made below. From what I've seen, you can get really creative with this thing: animate your traveling on the map, upload pictures from your trip, import check-ins from your Foursquare, and of course, share your maps with your friends and family.

Once I spend more time exploring Tripline's features, I will probably write another blog on it. For now, here is the itinerary that me and Ignas did while in Peru! The map is not an image! It's a video! Don't forget to PRESS PLAY in the top right corner. :)

If you zoom out on the map below, you'll see that we only got to spend time in southern Peru. We were sad that we couldn't include any northern destinations, especially Ignas since there's really good surfing there.  

We were debating on including Lake Titicaca or the Amazon but we decided not to do either. We felt that we would lose too much time traveling and we didn't want to exhaust ourselves by constantly moving. Although we really only visited the regions of Arequipa, Cusco, and the Sacred Valley, we were happy that we had as much time as we did. And as always, we also wished we had more time at each place! There was just so much to see and do!