Two for the price of one

I promised no more travel posts for a bit, but I do have to tell a bit about our Friday and Saturday. As previously noted, we went out to Ocean Beach, which was all right: the beach itself was relaxing, but the town was a bit goofy. The surfer-slacker-stoner vibe is so heavy, with random people playing random snatches of music on random instruments while riding skateboards, head shops and tattoo parlors everywhere, plus a heavy smattering of goofy tourist-trap stuff smeared on top, that it feels like it's trying too hard even when it's not really trying at all. Heck, even with the ocean breeze blowing hard down the middle of the street and me not near any particular shop, still the place smelled of incense at times. What really brought it down, though, is that everywhere there were smokers. And I don't mean pot like you might expect -- a little second-hand pot isn't gross and annoying like cigarettes are.

We'd been considering coming back after lunch to while away the afternoon before dinner at Hodad's, a now-famous burger shack that was featured on Guy Fieri's show, but Hodad's turns out to have become way too famous and always has a huge line (and people say the quality's also dropped off too). So we split to go to eat lunch at In-N-Out (because, being an east-coastie, I never had, and wondered what the big deal was -- I agree it's better than Wendy's and thus the best fast food burger, but not by a huge amount), then with a bunch of time to kill, took the bus to Old Town to visit a game shop with a good selection of roleplaying and board games. Didn't buy anything, though; but on the way back, stopped at one of those shops that sells knick-knacks and bought a few, notably the sunstone pictured here, which is a foot and a half across and weighs about 15 pounds, and which I lugged the rest of the day, as carry-on luggage on the planes, even.

After that we mostly just whiled away time at the hotel until we headed to the airport, hours ahead of our 9:45pm departure time. We had no real problems with the flights (on Continental, not Delta, this time), and even arrived almost on time, at about 9:30am local time Saturday morning. Unfortunately, though, neither of us got more than a few minutes of dozing here and there. So when we got home around 11, we had been up more than 25 hours.

We hoped to get a few hours of sleep before heading to pick up Socks, but at just that time, we got a warning about a fraudulent PayPal transaction, and by time we'd finished dealing with that, it was less than an hour until time to leave. Not worth going to sleep. By then, we'd gotten a second wind. So... basically, we never went to bed. As I write this, about 7:30pm, I've been awake for 34 straight hours, and I only feel about as tired as I might on a day when I had only six hours of sleep.

So the plan now is to go to sleep early, sleep late, and thus return in one fell swoop to our normal schedule, without jet lag. I wonder if I'll end up getting seven hours sleep as usual, or if I'll actually be able to sleep in. Normally I can't no matter how tired I am, but I've never stayed up this long before.