Driving trip to San Diego

It all started last week. A friend here living at the Co-Op said that a friend of his is coming to the US on the weekend, and they may have no chance to meet again in the next 4 years. So we started to plan a trip to San Diego in the weekend, to give his friend an experience of her life.

We searched on the net for points of interest, hotels and ways of going there, almost working every night, but it's very sophisticated and confusing. The bus is inconvenient, the train is too slow and the schedule isn't good, car rentals are very expensive and inconvinent in terms of age restrictions and insurance. Almost every affordable hotel, hostel and motel is shown as full on their website. So we gave up planing, and just go.

The mess started Friday night. We took a bus to LAX, to pick up the girl who's coming, just to find out that our guy here doesn't know her flight number, only vaguely knows her approximate arrival time and what airline she "might" take. We learned the hard way that her plane delayed an hour, and it took really long to get through the customs. We waited 2 hours in the arrival terminal. During the long wait, we called several car rentals. Most aren't even picking up the phone, also, a total of 6 people means that a minivan is needed, which is really expensive and hard to find. With all of us under age 24, it gets even harder. Eventually, Budget agreed to provide a deal for a minivan, an international driver's license and drivers of age 21. But things get even more complicated when our friend finds a problem with his credit card. In the end, the rent is on me, who has a CA driver's license, an American bank issued credit card
a US address and US phone numbers, making the situation simpler for the car rental, but putting the burden on my self. We got a Pontiac Montana. It is a minivan, so it need some getting used to. The parking brake is foot operated, the shift is located on the dash board, and it's really hard to see what's going on in the back. However, with some help and advice from my friend, after not driving for 2 years, and only been on the highway once, I managed to get the car back to the Co-Op intact, and fast. The feeling of driving is slowly getting back to me.

Next morning, all 6 of us got together and loaded into the van. We planed to get going at 9:30am, but ended up leaving at 11... So much for getting up early. Because my friend got his license in Taiwan, and is using an international license, he forgot that it's illegal to park near a curb. And a police car just went by when we are preparing to leave. Crap, we've started to trip with a ticket. It was a grudging traffic jam on the 405. Getting inpatient, and with insufficient driving experience, I made thousands of dangerous lane changes just in one morning. After 1~2 hours, I gradually got better with dealing with highway traffic, drove more smoothly and decreased my lane changes dramatically to increase safety. We got from the 405 to I-5 around noon, and made a stop at a Subway restaurant for lunch. This is also where I exchanged seats with my friend, letting him drive the rest, for fear that I might fall asleep after prolonged driving.

Halfway, we stopped at Oceanside to go play at the beach and take a walk on the pier.It was a nice sunny day, with a fine sandy beach and many people. It feels so great to get wet in the sea water. But once the water gets into your mouth, it's so salty that you could hardly take it. After getting out of the water, I got a pair of cargo pants with pockets of salt and sand, leaving me with salty pants pockets to deal with for the rest of the trip. The pier is much simpler then Santa Barbara or Santa Monica. It's just a plain long wooden pier with less then 3 stores on it, and the rest of it filled with people fishing. It is a simple public beach, all fun, less places to waste money, and free parking.

Another mess came our way after we leave Oceanside and head on towards San Diego. We started our search of hotels in Oldtown, which is near Seaworld. But what we got is: "full, full, full, no vacancy, full..." One even told us that as far as they know, every hotel in San Diego is full. Just as we are starting to get desperate, I fired up my Clie PDA, launched Earthcomber, set up our location, and zoomed out the map, taping randomly to find a hotel/motel, thinking, any vacancy is good enough. Luckily, on my first tap on a place with sufficient spots on the map, I got a Super 8 Motel, with their phone number listed right there in my Clie. I called, and got their last available room. Never thought Earthcomber could save my ass, but it sure did this time. Over the phone, the operator said that 6 people is OK, but we opened the door to find a room for 2. After realising that it's the last available room, we packed in. One interesting point is that the bathroom took half the size of the entire room. The twin bed consists of a mattress on top of another, so we split the to layers and there we've got a nice but clouded bed. We went to the near by town for dinner. The surrounding area is near the intersection of I-15, I-8 and highway 163, and the roads are very confusing, full of left/right turn only lanes, no U-turns and narrow roads with occasional road side parking. We often missed turns, encounter "no U-turns" and, as a result, drove on in the wrong direction for a long distance before we could turn back. I originally expected to have fast food or a dinner, but, with 5 Taiwanese and 1 Chinese on board, and most of us feed up with the junk food at the Co-Op, we went to a Chinese restaurants.

So that concludes our first day...

Photo album | Read part II