San Diego here we come.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I arranged a 9am flight to San Diego, but that translated as a 5 am wake-up as I finished my last minute to do’s before heading over to my friend Diane’s. Since her daughter, Kendall is a senior editor and one of the trip goers, she arranged for Heather and Kitty to meet at her house before we headed to the airport at 6:30am. All of us were sleeping and hardly functioning.

They had some trouble getting the plane to the gate (These are the types of things that worry me tremendously about air travel. If they can’t even get the plane to the gate, how am I supposed to trust their capabilities to get the plane in the air?)

So, we finally took off. The movie was Wild Hogs which some of you may remember is the movie I saw returning from Europe. I still think it is wildly hilarious.

We arrived in San Diego and went to pick up luggage. Fun story #1. We are waiting and waiting, but Kitty’s luggage doesn’t come. So, we are standing there 10 minutes after the last piece has come off and there is still about a dozen pieces of luggage circling on the carousel. Circling, circling. All of a sudden she says, Oh, there it is. That’s right, it had been there for quite some time and she hadn’t recognized her luggage. Sigh.

Fun story #2 But she isn’t the only ding dong, because we arrived and I realized I had left the information about rental company, hotel etc at home. So, called my friend Diane who went through the info I had sent and told us Hertz was the rental car company and Marriott Courtyard was the hotel, but there was no address. Crud.

Made our way to Hertz where we got a Toyota Highlander with GPS. I love GPS; it really makes getting places much easier. So, rental car down. I got the Hertz people to give me a phone number for Marriott double tree who said that we didn’t have a reservation. Oh dear. Diane had a main number, and they helped us figure out which hotel and the address. I’d like to think I’m usually better organized than this, but I have been so busy, this is something that never made it to the forefront of the get your act together program.

We arrived in Old Town San Diego at about 11:00, but they told us there wouldn’t be a room available for a couple of hours. They would call us when it was ready. We walked over to old town to eat. Lovely lunch. Then we took a trip to Mission Beach. Great weather, lots of people enjoying the sun. By the way, they never did call. We finally returned to the hotel, and they had a room ready. We went by the grocery store on our way back to the hotel and got some snack food etc.

We worked for a couple of hours on pulling magazine spreads and deciding what spread would work for what subject in the book. We finally went to dinner at about 7, got back to the hotel and were in bed by 9pm. We were very tired.

One of the girls turned the air on before we went to bed, but only turned the fan on, not the cool. When the phone woke me at 3am, I was already hot and uncomfortable. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night, finally figured out the cool issue at about 6am. Guy above us was a very heavy stepper and he moved around his room all night.

I’m going to insert a weird incident that I think is descriptive of potential problems with the yearbook staff. It isn't a big deal in and of itself, but it is indicative of problems. I had been talking since we arrived about being thirsty and wanting water, but we never passed any convenience stores or anything. After we went to the beach, they started walking around and I stopped into a nail salon (it was necessary, my toes were a mess.) They walked by and I asked them to get me a bottled water. The nail guy said he had water, and I could tell he was offering me a glass. I said yes, I’d love some. And the girls walked off. When we met back up, they all had bottled water. So, my last words were please get me a bottled water. If they were confused, they didn’t verify that I did or didn’t want one anymore. They didn’t text me when they got somewhere and bought their bottles of water. It’s about communication. We can’t produce this yearbook and not have people really being sure that they are communicating.