Our flight was leaving on Thursday morning to San Diego. We got up at 5:45am. Our eldest son got up soon after we did. He didn’t want to miss us leaving in the morning. He was pretty upset at our leaving, and took a couple days to get over some bouts of weepiness. We left in a cab as he was crying and waving, held by my mother. Bummer.

We flew out of Chicago’s Midway airport — smaller than O’Hare, but still pretty big. Our airline of choice was Southwest Airlines, where the flight attendant announced that “all seats are first-class”. Probably a more accurate statement would be that none of the seats were first-class. As you may already know, Southwest doesn’t offer any meals or inflight entertainment. They did offer a little box of snacks, which contained Chips Ahoy Cookie Crisps, something I won’t be seeking out in the supermarket unless all other eating options are unavailable. The flight was perfectly fine, though, on time and all that stuff.

We had MizSplotchy’s fancypants MacBook laptop along for the ride, and a thumb drive full of movies and TV shows at hand. On the flight to San Diego we watched The King Of Kong, which was a truly awesome documentary about a man attempting to capture the high score of the old-school videogame Donkey Kong. I first learned about this documentary from comedian Patton Oswalt’s website. His synopsis of the movie cannot be improved upon, so I’ll include it here.

THE KING OF KONG is about the International Donkey Kong high-score championship, and how far some people will go to defend such a pointless and meaningless title. I’ve never seen a documentary where the hero and villain are SO clearly defined. Watch KING OF KONG, and marvel at the sad douchebaggery of Billy Mitchell.

After we landed, we took a tram to pick up our rental car. It was cloudy and chilly, and despite the abundance of palm trees, it still felt like Illinois. A short twenty minute drive and we arrived at our hotel. They wouldn’t let us check in yet, so we left our bags and went in search of lunch. There was a Denny’s across the street that I was reluctant to go to, because I thought it was a bad omen to start one’s vacation there. However, we didn’t really know where things were, and it was right there. So, to Denny’s.

There were four of us on the flight out of Midway, and four others on a later flight from O’Hare. While we were finishing up our lunch, the rest of the group came into the restaurant. Most of our group were family from MizSplotchy’s mom’s side, though one of her cousins had her boyfriend along.

We were going to surprise MizSplotchy’s brother that night, so we had some time to kill. We asked for a recommendation (the trip wasn’t meticulously planned out) and a couple people suggested we go to Seaport Village. We had two rental cars, me in the lead. I made a left turn instead of a right and completely missed Seaport Village. I ended up turning into a neighborhood called Gaslamp Quarter.

I parked at a meter ($0.25/12 minutes!) and we started walking around. At this point I realized our group was a collection of different interests — many in the group were content to lay back and sit down for a drink, while others were itching to experience vacation NOW. As you might guess, I was in the itchy experience camp. So, MizSplotchy’s cousin and I went for a long walk in the neighborhood while everyone else sat down outside and ordered some drinks. It was a relatively high-end commercial area. We found a big Ghirardelli’s cafe and bought some chocolatey goodness. As we finally got back to the bar where the rest of the gang was commiserating, it was time to go surprise MizSplotchy’s brother.

We had decided to go to his house and park around the block, knocking on his door a couple people at a time (yes, I was thinking of the opening to The Hobbit as we were doing this, thank you very much). MizSplotchy and her aunt went first (they were the only people that were expected to fly in for the birthday). Then little by little we knocked on the door and went in. MizSplotchy’s brother was truly surprised, which was nice.

After we settled down and talked for a while we headed over to one of MizSplotchy’s brother’s favorite restaurants, the Butcher Shop Steak House, a cozy place in Chula Vista with red-leather seating and warm lighting. They had very delicious, hot sourdough garlic bread, which was probably my favorite part of the meal (I like bread, what can I say?). You can find generally favorable reviews of this restaurant online, but they neglect to mention the very lovely waitresses working there. I’m theoretically against the objectification of women, but boy howdy, the waitresses there were smoking hot. Their uniform consisted of a very short skirt and black fishnet stockings. The tops varied. Our waitress had a very low-cut white top from which her ample bosom spilled from. And she was cute, too! I didn’t have my camera with me for this first day, so you’ll just have to trust me about the waitress. MizSplotchy was fortunate enough to hear me talk about this woman for the rest of the meal, mostly along the lines of “Wow, that waitress is pretty! And she has big boobs!”.

After the boobs and dinner, we retired to the lovely Ramada Inn by the 805 to rest up for the following day’s adventures.

Next up: Seaport Village, ocean frolicking, seafood served by an attractive non-buxom gentleman waiter, and picture, pictures, pictures.