3 Perfect Days in San Diego: Day 1
3 Perfect Days in San Diego: Day 2
3 Perfect Days in San Diego: Day 3
Last weekend, the Future Mrs. Guru and I flew to San Diego, and spent 3 great days there. Hopefully, this report will be useful to anyone planning a trip to San Diego, as I’ve seen and posted a number of good deals to San Diego recently.
Early Thursday morning, we flew from Charlotte to San Diego with a quick layover in Washington DC (Dulles Airport). After a quick 50 minute flight from Charlotte, we spent the 30 or so minute layover in the United lounge in Terminal D, which has a mediocre breakfast selection of bagels, cereal, donut holes (the chocolate ones are good!), fruit, and oatmeal…but it’s at least a nice, quiet place to relax. There is also a Lufthansa lounge in DC, which is head and shoulders above any of the United lounges, but it unfortunately doesn’t open until 8:30 am, and we were only in DC from about 7:00-8:00 am. Our flight to San Diego would be leaving only a few gates away from where our Charlotte flight arrived, which was very convenient. Dulles has a very new and very clean underground train between terminals, with an automated voice that sounds like they invested months of research and oodles of taxpayer money to develop the most incomprehensible voice known to man. In addition, some of the stations are impressively far away from the actual terminal building, requiring about a 7 minute walk from the time you get off the train until you actually are in the terminal for that stop. In any event, we did not have to take the exquisitely clean, unintelligible, and inconvenient train on this trip.
After a 5 hour flight from DC to San Diego, we landed right on time. The approach into San Diego is a bit daunting – the arrival is also right over downtown, seemingly a maze through the high-rise buildings. Take a look at a photo of what this approach looks like:
DAY 1) Although we were pretty tired from an early morning, we landed around 10:20 am, so we still had a full day ahead of us to take advantage of. The San Diego airport is only 10 minutes from downtown, so it’s quick and easy to get into the city. We stayed at the Grand Hyatt, which was a beautiful hotel, right on San Diego Bay:
After checking into the hotel, we walked over to the Gaslamp Quarter, which is the popular restaurant, bar, and nightlife district. It’s not a huge area – easily walkable – only about 4 blocks by 4 blocks. There are dozens of restaurants from every corner of the world – Italian, Thai, Indian, and of course, lots of Mexican. We spent about 25 minutes walking around looking at all the options, coming to a near decision half a dozen times only to look down the block to see another option that we had to go check out. We finally decided on Royal Thai Restaurant on 5th Ave, which had a very good lunch special. Almost all the restaurants have outside seating to enjoy the fantastic weather.
After a filling outdoor lunch, we walked around the Gaslamp District a bit more, and happened across a dueling piano bar called The Shout House. The show would begin at 8:00 pm, and we made a mental note to come back that evening. At that point, we headed back to the Hyatt, an easy 10 minute walk, and headed up to the enormous pool deck on the 4th floor. There was 1 large pool, 2 jacuzzis, a fire pit where they were setup for s’mores every night, and plenty of space to relax. Since it was a bit chilly (low 60s with a breeze), we relaxed with a few margaritas in the hot tub.
For dinner, we went to Fred’s Mexican Restaurant, back in the Gaslamp District. The food was ok, but it wasn’t our favorite. We had heard good things about it, so perhaps they were having an off night, or maybe it was just that we had been up since 1 am local time (4 am Eastern Time). After dinner, we headed to The Shout House, getting there just a few minutes before 8:00. Around 8:15, the two young (mid 20s) pianists strolled up to the stage. It was a great, casual atmosphere – they introduced themselves, and started off with some Motown hits. They took requests, and soon the whole bar was jiving to an incredible mix from Elton John to Katy Perry, Journey to Cee Lo Green. We thought we’d only stay for 30 or 45 minutes since we were tired, but ended up staying well over an hour because it was just a fantastic performance. We HIGHLY recommend visiting The Shout House if you’re in San Diego – it’s open every night of the week. The drink prices were a bit on the high side, but the entertainment was phenomenal.
Stay tuned for Days 2 and 3! Feel free to leave any comments, questions, or other thoughts!