Well, we made it to San Diego, and if you’re reading this, we managed to scrounge up an Internet connection. The drive down was fairly uneventful, and we arrived too late to do much sightseeing, but we still managed to find some interesting sights.

For example, when we walked into our hotel room, we found a pizza flyer shoved under the door, and the following stand-up card on our table:

[Long card all about how illegal garage pizzaa parlors are pushing fliers under doors and you should rely on the hotel to choose your pizza place]

OK, so they have deals with some places, but come on! Garage operations with “unsafe” pizza?! I suppose it’s possible, though.

For those Babylon 5 fans, here’s an excerpt from the dining guide:

[Ad for the Zocalo Grill]

And we encountered another relative of Boba and Jango Fett at dinner:

[Part of a receipt indicating Medit Fett]

While driving back to the hotel, we missed a turn and ended up driving through the seedier part of town (we passed no less than three nudie bars). We also spotted a restaurant calling itself “Extreme Pizza” (which might explain the card in our room) and a movie theater with an interesting cross-section of Hollywood:

  • Hellboy
  • Kill Bill
  • Passion of the Christ

Sadly, we didn’t have a chance to capture either on fil– uh, pixels.

On our way out of Laguna Beach, we ended up on a side street parallelling PCH. Fortunately, we spotted this gem of a corner shopping center:

Just an ordinary corner shopping center - with a name out of Middle Earth
Just an ordinary corner shopping center – with a name out of Middle Earth

Now, the nearby city of Lake Forest has had Tolkien-named streets for years (Gondor, Elrond, and others), and of course UCI has its Middle Earth dorm complex. I have no idea how long this one has been there, but it’s interesting to think that we never would have found it if we’d been able to make a left turn out of the hotel parking lot!

Update: Cross streets are Calliope and Glenneyre

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