Into the Rainy North

Final preparations are underway for our first vacation of the year.  We’ll be heading up to the Bay Area this week, hitting Hearst Castle, Monterey & Carmel, San Jose and San Francisco and visiting my brother brionv and his fiancee, my aunt, and sekl and non_seqvitvr. We’ll also be attending WonderCon for the second time.  We had fun last year, but figured on making it an occasional trip rather than something annual.  Then we decided to go visit people in the area, and found out the best week (i.e. when   was going to be done with her current job) was going to be the week leading up to the convention.  If we were going to be in San Francisco anyway, the con was cheap, so we might as well go.  (Then the perfect timing became irrelevant, but we had already bought tickets to the con, and I’d already arranged for the time off, so we were at least partly anchored to this weekend in San Francisco.)

It looks like this trip is certainly going to mirror last year’s trip in one more aspect: rain.  Someday we’ll have to schedule a trip up north at a time that it’s expected to be sunny.  (I’m guessing February isn’t it.)

Overnight in San Diego

My company will sometimes do its Christmas party as a destination event. It was in Las Vegas one year, and one year it was even a 3-day cruise. I think it’s a holdover from the dot-com days during which we’d always have an annual ski trip and an annual summer trip. Then it was cut down to one trip. And now it’s combined with the Christmas party.

This year it was held in San Diego, at the Omni Hotel. Since it’s relatively close, we were all on our own for transportation, so alenxa and I took it at our own pace, spending Saturday afternoon in Old Town, hitting a farmer’s market, and so forth. Unfortunately it was casino-themed, and I’m not really big on gambling (though Katie made a killing at blackjack), but the food was really good (it was the in-hotel McCormick and Schmick’s, and while I couldn’t eat the seafood, the steak was quite good, and the chocolate cake was excellent), and I think I have gained at least a rudimentary understanding of craps beyond “you roll the dice and bet on how they land.”

( K2R: Old Town, the Omni, and just how big is that space by the convention center, anyway? )

Now if I could just figure out what to do with this wireless keyboard and mouse…

Nighttime view: San Diego Hilton & Convention Center