San Diego ‘09
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
The previous day had been an exhausting one at California Adventure, but that didn’t stop Jimmy and I from waking up at the butt crack of dawn and getting ready for another full day of excitement on Friday, July 17, 2009. We left his house in San Pedro at about 8:15am and headed back to Disneyland to meet David, where he parked his car and then rode with us. Our ultimate destination of the day was San Diego, a city that I had visited twice without ever really ’seeing’. We also decided to stop in San Juan Capistrano on the way down to see the famous Jewel of the Missions located there. Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, July 15, 2009, was a mostly leisurely day in southern California – at least relative to the weekend we had spent in Vegas and the upcoming final three days of my California trip. I even slept in a little bit and let Bob go down and grab his continental breakfast in the Culver Hotel before I followed. We posed for our pictures hanging out the windows of the famous hotel seen in several silent Laurel and Hardy films (detailed more 
It was about 8:30am on the morning of Tuesday, July 14, 2009, when Bob and I checked out of room 2467 of the Paris Las Vegas hotel. We had had a great two days there, but it was time to work our way back to Los Angeles to continue with my California adventure. We crossed over the border and had made it halfway toward our L.A. destination when we stopped for brunch in Barstow at an eatery known as Quigley’s. Bob had the monte cristo and I went for the breakfast border burrito. We sat near a ‘biddy brigade’ that Bob ended up knowing. 
I had spent ample time the night before getting ready for my Summer 2009 California journey, having packed all of my clothes, assembled celebrity photos that I needed to bring along, and had all of my incidentals ready to go. However, on the morning of Saturday, July 11, I made an almost near-fatal faux pas which almost wrecked the whole thing. I had set my alarm for 4:20 am with plans to head to my Dad’s house at 5:00, leave his place by 5:30, and arrive at the airport by 6am for my 7am departure. It was all mapped out and it seemed like a bulletproof plan. 
For the most part, everything that I was experiencing during my Guatemala trip was a complete surprise as I had gone into the trip without any research or preconceived notions about what I would be seeing. The Mayan ruins of Tikal, however, were a bit of an exception as this was a landmark I had actually heard of and took the liberty of seeking out some info about before I left for the trip. Of all of the locations in Guatemala, this was probably the most famous and the one that I was most looking forward to.