The week of Halloween, we took a family vacation to San Diego. We’d been before, but wanted to get away to somwhere with warmer weather, sun, relatively cheap flights, and the same time zone. We looked at a few different cities and ended up in San Diego when we found the perfect rental for our needs. We’ve found that condo or house rentals work really well for us and usually are the same price as a family-friendly room(s) or chepaer. Having Dom sleep in our hotel room isn’t an option — we moved him to his crib at three weeks. :-) This was also the first time we bought Dom an airplane seat (yay Alaska Airlines $99 companion fare!) and that was simply amazing.

We aren’t big beach people, and Dom isn’t an all-day-of-anything type of person, so we stayed in a house on the bay in Mission Beach. We’re also on a one nap schedule, so we wanted to be close to things without having to drive all over the city. We were within walking distance of Belmont Park, the beach, and a few restaurants (with bars!) so our days generally consisted of a “San Diego” activity in the morning and then walking somewhere in the afternoon. Dom’s pretty easy to entertain at this age, so he loved nearly everything we did – the zoo, the park, time on the beach, walks, museums, tattoo parlor… whatever.

The beauty of a one nap schedule is you’re limited in what you can do, assuming you want to respect the nap (and we very much do). This is good for us because we are the type of travelers that try to see and do as much as possible. Having a mid-day nap forces us to slow down, relax, and actually take a vacation; not “travel.” The result is I take four naps in a week. I don’t think I’d taken more than that many since Dom has been born. I’m just plain bad at it… except when I’m on vacation, apparently. We also got some grown up time, which was great.

Oh, and we were delayed coming home for a few hours because it was snowing it Seattle. Ha.