{"id":836,"date":"2012-07-31T22:12:21","date_gmt":"2012-08-01T03:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2012\/07\/31\/120731-summervacation\/"},"modified":"2022-03-10T13:49:17","modified_gmt":"2022-03-10T19:49:17","slug":"120731-summervacation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2012\/07\/31\/120731-summervacation\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Did On Our Summer Vacation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Never drive past Comic-Con if you’re in a hurry to be somewhere else. Or unless you like watching alien girls with green skin wearing tin foil bikinis. I think everyone falls into one of those categories.<\/p>\n

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That structure that looks like a giant juicer? It’s a giant juicer. No, just kidding. It’s the new San Diego public library<\/a>, all $185 million worth. (And you thought Midland was being extravagant with its new library.) We could have saved our imaginary film by just going to this site<\/a> and rewinding to July 12th.<\/p>\n

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The Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery<\/a> is always a moving experience. We read the inscriptions on the headstones and tried to guess about the lives represented.<\/p>\n

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I’m a sucker for pelican photos. How can anything be so simultaneously silly, somber, and prehistoric? Besides Betty White, that is.<\/p>\n

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I may be a sucker for pelicans, but guess who can’t pass up a penny flattener? Good thing we don’t have progeny. I can just hear the executor of our estate: “And to all the kids, equal shares of your mother’s extensive flat penny collection.”<\/i> On second thought, it would be pretty cool to do that to them. They never write; they never call.<\/p>\n

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People are sometimes like horses: you can lead them to the Alfred Hitchcock movie, but you can’t make them believe THOSE BIRDS ARE OUT TO GET YOU!<\/p>\n

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You know you have an impressive yacht when your helicopter costs more than any of the surrounding boats at the dock. This is\u00a0Dennis Washington<\/a>‘s motor yacht, the Attessa IV<\/i> (Attessa<\/i> is Greek for I’ve got more money than you. And your country.<\/i>) It’s a 332-foot vessel that made waves<\/a> (ha!) when it docked in boat-jaded San Diego.<\/p>\n

I can’t help wondering how they managed to get it into this parking lot, though.<\/p>\n

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The boat was so long I couldn’t get it all into one shot. Sorta like the lines at the DMV.<\/p>\n

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Nothing conveys a sense of peace and relaxation while walking along the Pacific shoreline like being buzzed by an airplane towing a banner for a strip club.<\/p>\n

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The Museum of Natural History had a special exhibit on horses. Of course, of course.<\/p>\n

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If you wondered, as I did, how they got the horses to wear those gas masks, they simply showed them this as an example of what happens to unmasked horses.<\/p>\n

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The San Diego Automotive Museum had a steampunk exhibit. I’ve always wondered what would happen if a ceiling fan married a tricycle, and I bet you have, too.<\/p>\n

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This looks like a chassis of a stagecoach – sort of – but it’s an apparently functional pedal-driven contraption. All kinds of awesome.<\/p>\n

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A genuine Dirigible Inspection Service Craft? What could be cooler than that!? Nothing, unless it was being operated by a green skinned alien girl wearing a tinfoil bikini and who also happened to be a zombie.<\/p>\n

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Seriously? Can you believe the weird contraptions some people ride nowadays?<\/p>\n

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Speaking of weird contraptions, I have no idea why all of these electric cars were lined up in the parking lot, unless they were waiting for a big bird to come along and hatch them. (Yeah, it’s getting late.)<\/p>\n

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Can you imagine how old that thing is? And the bonsai bougainvillea has been around for a while, too. *duck and cover*<\/i><\/p>\n

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It’s not a pelican – well, I’m pretty sure it’s not – but it’s still silly, somber, and prehistoric. Plus, it apparently can hover. [Pretty sure it wasn’t the prototype for what’s in the last photo, below, but stranger things have happened.]<\/p>\n

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If you go to Peohe’s for dinner on your birthday, they make a big deal of it. As well they should, given that they’re charging $68.95 for a seafood tower.<\/p>\n

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They say that everything is bigger in Texas, but “they” have never seen a yaupon on Coronado Island. It looks like something from a Peter Jackson nightmare.<\/p>\n

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Sea dragons at the Birch Aquarium: silly, somber, and…well…you know. That one on the left is giving me the stink eye. Although he could just have gas.<\/p>\n

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We took one of these out for a spin. It’s a hovercraft. It’s amazing how touchy the US Navy is about people “borrowing” their amphibious assault vehicles. Somebody’s definitely off our Christmas card list this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Never drive past Comic-Con if you’re in a hurry to be somewhere else. Or unless you like watching alien girls with green skin wearing tin foil bikinis. I think everyone falls into one of those categories. That structure that looks like a giant juicer? It’s a giant juicer. No, just kidding. It’s the new San… Continue reading What We Did On Our Summer Vacation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8460,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions\/8460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}