June 3rd: Some Last Minute Adventuring

Even with all of the flying we did that morning, it was still only early afternoon when we left Brown Field. We wanted to make the most of our last afternoon, so we made our way out to Coronado, grabbed some lunch at a really good cafe, and set out to explore a bit.

It only took a few minutes to get to the Hotel del Coronado. It's a huge Victorian era luxury hotel that sits right on the beach. We pretended that we belonged there and wandered back through a few pathways to check it out.

Jen wanted to get a better angle for the picture she was trying to take.   :)

The beach was beautiful (as was the entire rest of the resort).

We spent a little while longer wandering through the hotel, then eventually moved on.

We walked around for a bit...

...eventually made it as far as the ferry dock, then made our way back to the car, stopping at a couple shops (including a crazy candy store) along the way. We were pretty tired by then, so we went back to Jen's house for a bit of a break before heading out for our last couple stops of the trip.

Since we only had one sunset left, we went to Ocean Beach. Jen only lives a couple miles from here, and one of her running routes is basically a run to this beach and back. I wish I could run to the beach from my house!

Ocean Beach has a huge pier, so we started to wander down toward the end.

There were a few guys surfing near the pier; I kept stopping to watch them.

This guy was selling paintings and prints on the pier. Jen and Mike each bought a painting, and I bought a couple prints.

We eventually got to the end of the pier. It looked like we'd finally have a clear night for a sunset!

We started to make our way back to the beach from the end of the pier. The angle of the sun behind the pier made for some great sunset pictures.

This was one of my favorites...there were a few pelicans flying around that kept diving into the water. I caught this one just as it started its dive, and didn't realize until after I uploaded the picture later that night that there was a second bird flying around behind the pelican.

The sun was sitting very low in the sky by the time we got back to the end of the pier. Jen and Mike wanted a picture of the sun setting behind the pier's gate, so they closed half the gate for a minute to get the picture.

As soon as other people wandering by saw what we had set up, they all wanted in on the picture, too. It was pretty funny. We eventually were able to open the gate again and walked down to the beach.

The sun was just starting to slip below the horizon when we got down to the sand, so I ran under the pier to get some better pictures.

We even saw a green flash as the sun finished setting! It was the first one I'd seen; I had only read about it up to this point. Basically, the atmosphere causes the light from the sun to separate out into different colors, and if conditions in the atmosphere are favorable you can see the green for the last second or two as the sun slips below the horizon.

We made our way back to the car and went to Rancho's for dinner. They have really good Mexican food, and I had a steak and shrimp burrito that was absolutely amazing. I could only finish half of it because it was so big (something that still makes me sad because it was so good).

Since Mike had an early flight back to Canada the next morning and we were all pretty tired anyway, we made it an early night and went back to Jen's after dinner. Mark made sure to play with Maggie and Sky while he could, then we said goodbye to Mike, packed a bit for our flight home, and went to bed.