On the weekend of the 7th September, we went to San Diego. We had booked this trip a couple of weeks in advance (very unusual for us) because we had read that there was a huge food and music festival on Saturday/Sunday. On the 6th September, Jo found out that it cost $45 per person for entry to the festival, so instead we had a quieter weekend in San Diego seeing the less expensive sights.
On Saturday we went drove down to San Diego first thing, arriving about 10.30am and went to the Zoo where there was a white elephant sale (no, not a real white elephant for sale :-) and we bought a quantity of souveneirs as we are members of the Zoo and were able to get in to the sale before the general public. Rob bought some pan pipes (he thinks) and Jo bought a carved stone animal. We decided that we'd go back to the Zoo earlier on the Sunday and so left and went for a walk around the parklands surrounding the zoo; known as Balboa Park.
We had a look through an artist's village and around the beautiful gardens and buildings that are part of the park. The Botanical Building housed lots of tropical plants, such as lillies, orchids, cacti, herbs that could be touched and smelt, and even some carnivorous plants. The flowers were beautiful, and there were lots of people taking photos. At the front of the building was a lilly pond. One of the lillies had leaves about 1/2 a metre in diameter, with vertical sides.
After lunch we went to the Reuben Fleet Science Center, also in Balboa Park, which is similar to the Investigator Science Centre in Adelaide, and Questacon in Canberra. It also had an IMAX theatre and a "Deep Sea Motion Simulator Ride".
We had a lot of fun in the exhibits; they were different to those we'd seen in Adelaide and Canberra and were all hands on - there were some particularly clever (and as a result, funny) ones involving mirrors, and lights which made it look like the faces of people on opposite sides of the table were merged (or parts of the merged). Yes, it was all done with mirrors!
We watched the Coral Reef adventure IMAX film, most of which was filmed in the Great Barrier Reef or the South Pacific - it was projected on the inside of a dome and was very impressive. The "Deep Sea Motion Ride" was just like the Star Tours ride at Disneyland - sitting in a shuttle pod on a simulated ride but this time under the sea. It was fun, Jo thinks it was better than it's friend at Disneyland.
