Cooking dinner (Marty, Candi, Deric & Dennis)
Rooftop bar Altitude (Candi & Junior, Betty & Dennis)
Dinner at Jim Croce's jazz restaurant (Candi, Junior, Dennis, Betty)
Dennis, Deric, Betty, Candi, Junior and Marty at a wine tasting We just returned from San Diego, probably the most awesome city in the United States! It has everything required for a utopia. Lucky residents and visitors experience perfect weather the year around - pleasant days and cool evenings, beaches and boating, mountains, art and cultural activities, a diverse population, more restaurants than you could ever try, a world-class zoo, Sea World, a wild animal park....the list is endless. And all packaged in a lifestyle that promotes healthy living, spending time outdoors and walking to your destination.
We stayed at the Marriott in the Gaslamp District....sixteen blocks with 94 historical buildings containing shops, galleries, restaurants and bars. With hundreds of choices within walking distance, the biggest decision each night was what type of food we wanted. One night we ate at a steak restaurant where you cooked your own food and the next night, we had an outside table at Jim Croce's jazz restaurant. Despite the endless choice of restaurants, an hour wait for a table on the weekend is not unusual.
Sitting outside for dinner is an experience within itself. In addition to the food and live music, you have the added entertainment of watching the endless parade of fashionable people who have gone to great effort to dress for dinner or the elegant bar scene. Young people decked out in the height of fashion - girls in their mile-high stilettos and short dresses accompanied by impeccably dressed young men, all in the prerequisite color of BLACK. Then you see the occasional older tourist drift by in their sensible shoes, fanny packs and no-iron travel clothes, looking a bit bewildered that none of their travel brochures suggested they dress a little more appropriately in the evening.
"The" place to be after 10:00 at night is a rooftop LA-style bar called Altitude, where they really do have a velvet rope, huge burly doormen, and a line to get in that stretches through the hotel lobby, out the door and down the block on weekends. Because we were guests at the hotel, we were able to bypass the lines, but I have a feeling the 20 and 30-something age "beautiful people" waiting in those endless lines wondered why "parent-aged" people like us would be going to such a cool place! Maybe they will understand in another 25 years.
But being in the perfect place wouldn't have been as special without good friends to share it with. I cherish the memories we made, the conversations we had and those moments in time we created.
Life is very good indeed!
