Continued from Southern California Day 7.

I don’t know what the kids did to earn it this morning, but they are getting chocolate milk as part of their breakfast.

RL is a fan of this stone console at our hotel lobby.

Where little KL got his first ever haircut.

Cool brick color on this building. It was kinda metallic looking in person.

Since we don’t need to checkout until 11am, time to let the kids use up their energy at the waterfront park playground.

This thing was like ice when wet, super slippery. A lawsuit waiting to happen.

Coffee is the best.

OK, got as much energy as we could get out of them, let’s hope the rest of the day goes smoother.

On the walk back to hotel, we saw these buses with police escort. Politicians?

All packed up and ready to go.

Getting that pizza last night is paying dividends.

Remember all the food that I got the first night here in San Diego that no one wanted to eat? That’s lunch for me today baby. Yum.

This is actually quite chill and nice.

A quick, less than 3min drive from the hotel and we made it to the rental car drop off. San Diego is convenient in that the airport is literally downtown, but that also means much of the city is in the flight path and you can hear the jets all day.

Things I like. Engine, handling, and comfy ride. It’s so quiet and stable at 90mph that it eats up miles like nobody’s business. Everyone drives fast here in SoCal and it’s not unusual to go 90mph on the freeways here.

Things I hate. Everything else. The infotainment system is not intuitive, the gps is not intuitive, the gesture control is stupid and you can’t reach for your cup in center without the car thinking you are giving it some command. The rear doors are wayyyyy too long. It makes it impossible to get out of the second row seats when parking next to another car because you can’t open the doors very much without hitting the car next to you. The electric seat tilt and shift forward for the second row seats to get into third row is really really slow. You push the button, wait like 3 seconds, then it starts to move, and it’s really slow. Then you do it all over again to get it to go back to the original position. The trunk space is pretty small for such a big car, we had trouble fitting all of us and our luggage in the car.

Now, to shuttle to take us to terminal.

I guess they are excited to go home.

Terminal, let’s do this.

I am responsible for 4 different pieces of luggage…so much stuff.

Me and the kids have TSA Pre so we got through line quickly. Now we wait for RL…the kids are going crazy waiting right past the security area.

Chill children!!!

The airport is really crowded today, as to be expected for the holiday season. We barely could find an area with enough seats to accommodate all 5 of us.

I guess it’s a necessary thing in a stressful airport with kids.

Only way to calm them down.

So thankful that our flight is on time and all the flight interruptions due to the freeze across the country is mostly over. It would have been hell to be delayed at an airport with 3 little children.

It’s my turn to sit with this crazy one today.

Not a plane with the best reputation…

Bye San Diego, it’s been nice.

Below the wing is Sea World. Looks so small from up here.

He watches his show while I feed him bites of food.

Full flight.

Back in Austin!!

Came back with more luggage than we started with, but we had planned it by bringing an extra duffel bag…but even that wasn’t enough. We ended up with the extra yellow lego bag too. Successful first vacation with just the 5 of us. This will open the door for many future family vacations.