Chapter 120
Impromptu Road Trip

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(Originally posted December 9, 2013)

The next day was a total departure from anything we’d done recently in SoCal. It all started when Tracy was reading Facebook that morning and one of our friends from New York posted about how she had gone to Noodles and Company that day and gotten their new Truffle Mac and Cheese. Noodles is a chain that started in Colorado and hadn’t yet spread to NYC while we were living there, but it’s delicious. There are some locations in California, but the closest one to us is just outside of San Diego. Sounds like too far of a drive to take on a whim on a Sunday, right? Wrong.

We decided since we didn’t have anything better to do, why not head down to Encinitas. It was only supposed to be a one-and-a-half hour drive, after all. We probably still wouldn’t have made up our minds to go for sure, but we looked on Yelp to see if there were any other interesting attractions we could check out while we were down there. As it turned out, the San Diego Botanic Gardens were actually also in Encinitas, just a five-minute drive from Noodles. And just like that, we had our plans for the day!

We hit the road right after lunch.

You mostly just take the 5 all the way there, but it pretty quickly starts to run parallel to the coast.

We had fun on the drive and blasted some tunes by a composer friend of ours who I had gotten to work with while I was at NYU, Joe Iconis. If you are a musical theatre fan (or just a fan of music) he’s worth checking out.

Between the two CDs we had loaded on the phone, it served as the perfect soundtrack to get us all the way to the gardens.

We had found a coupon for a few dollars off both of our admission fees, so we had made the trip cheaper than it otherwise would have been. Once we got to the gardens, we just enjoyed walking around, taking in all the beautiful trees and flowers and waterfalls.

There were lots of benches and other seating areas scattered throughout, so even though there were four miles of trails that we walked, it all felt pretty relaxing.

Some of the plants were a little bizarre.

There were some people made out of topiaries, so I danced with this one.

We also kept hearing animals scurrying around in the brush and just hoped they weren’t snakes. Eventually, we caught a glimpse of some lizards.

We eventually got to this pretty section with tons of lily pads in a pond. We felt like where there were lily pads, there must be frogs.

And we were right!

There was also this cool dragonfly.

This fountain reminds me of one at Disneyland.

We sat by it for a little while.

When we got to the Australia section of the gardens, I made sure to take a picture. Any of you folks from down under recognize these plants/trees?

We kept walking to the children’s gardens, and I thought these were very pretty.

There was a treehouse to play in over there.

I have to admit, we were jealous of the people who lived around here.

I don’t know if I believe this plaque…

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