Day 2
My group was awakened to the sound of Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best,” my cell phone’s alarm clock. The immediate consensus among my group was that 4.5 of sleep was not enough, and the dismiss button was pressed. However we did find the motivation to pull ourselves out of bed when we remembered about the free pancake breakfast. HI-SD supplied the batter and all the equipment needed and you get to make your own pancakes; I was barely able to resist the strong urge to make a pancake Uncle Buck would be jealous of. It was interesting to see how people from different places made pancakes. I recall one man grilled up bell peppers and onions and then poured the batter on top of that, another person topped their pancakes with peanut butter and syrup.
After our filling meal, we went back to our rooms to nap and recover a bit more before our long day ahead of us. Before we knew it, it was time for my group to check out and go home. We walked them down to the trolley station and said our goodbyes. Tim and I assessed what we wanted to do today and we decided to check out Horton Plaza seeing how it was just down the street from our hostel. Because Tim only spent six dollars during the pub crawl, much less than he expected to spend, he figured he would have some extra money to find a gift for his mother. Tim is an adorable mama’s boy. We did grab a snack of frozen yogurt ($4.57) while Tim contemplated as to what would be a suitable gift for his mother. After a while of walking around the labyrinth that is Horton Plaza, we decided to give up and look for a gift somewhere else. We headed back to the hostel and shot some voiceovers for the first half of our trip (which were disregarded completely after the first edit of the video), and Tim decided he needed a shower and a nap if he was going to be any fun during the night.
The shower proved to be a bit more of a hassle than he had anticipated. You see, Tim was responsible and came for this vacation bringing the travel bottle of shampoo that he uses when taking a shower at his gym. I brought nothing of the sort. Tim was also kind enough to let me use his shampoo when I took my shower earlier that day. I, however, proved to the absentminded fool of the friendship and left his shampoo in the shower… and it was never seen again. Thus bringing Tim to make his first unexpected expense, a bottle of shampoo to replace the one I lost ($1.93).
While Tim slept, I took his laptop and went to the lounge and hopped on the free wifi and watched a bit of the generic cop drama show on the television. After having my fill of everything that the internet has to offer, I decided to do what every good friend would do in my situation, violently wake Tim up and get his reaction on film. Tim, who must’ve sensed my diabolical plan, was already awake by the time I arrived… Jerk.
Tim planned out the rest of day… which at the time boiled down to essentially:
Phase 1: Get a 2 day transit pass
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit
With this solid plan in mind, we headed up Fifth to the trolley station to attempt to complete Phase 1 of Tim’s plan. We arrived at the station, but Tim only had $20’s and which was too large for the transit pass machine to break, which led to Tim’s second unexpected purchase, and $.89 cent box of tic-tacs. Once Tim broke a twenty, he purchased a 2-day transit pass for $9.00, and we later realized that this inconvenience could have easily been avoided by simply purchasing a transit pass from the front desk of the hostel, but this hardly would be an interesting trip if everything went perfectly. We boarded a trolley and we were off to Seaport Village to continue looking for the perfect gift for Tim’s mom.
A brief walk to Seaport Village followed a short trolley ride… too short if you ask me. We didn’t realize Seaport Village was so close to our hostel, and it probably would’ve been faster to walk from our hostel. Seaport Village is filled with adorable trinket shops that I’m sure my mom would adore, thus making it was the ideal place to find that elusive gift for Tim’s mom. Tim ended up purchasing these dangly earrings ($16.16) from this store that wouldn’t let me film inside, so I’m deliberately not going to refer to it by name. Feeling that Seaport village had more to offer, Tim continued to look in other stores when we came upon a delightful seashell store and they had very inexpensive anklet ($4.30) that Tim purchased for the other important woman in his life, his girlfriend.
We took the trolley 2 stations east to the Gaslamp quarter, because we stupidly paid for two days of public transportation, and damn it, we were going to use it. We both were getting kind of hungry and wanted to visit a nice, sit down restaurant so we decided to once again use the knowledge of the hostel employees to point us in the direction of tasty, cheap food. Outside the hostel we ran into Jarred, the pub crawl guide from the night before, and explained our situation to him. Jarred recommended three places for us to check out: a gourmet burger joint, an Italian place, and a Mediterranian place. Tim chose the burger joint, and we walked across the street to Nicky Rotten’s, which felt like, to me at least, a rock star version of Red Robin. The prices were what we expected for a gourmet burger ($8.95) and upgrading to the garlic fries was only $1.00 more. It was also happy hour, meaning all beers were $3.00. Tim had the BBQ burger and a dark ale, and I had the bleu cheese burger and a glass of water. After tip and tax, this brought Tim’s dinner total to $15.87.
Once our meal was over, we realized we were still smack dab in the middle of Phase 2 of our plan and still wasn’t sure what our next move would be. We quickly changed Phase 2 to be “Walk around the hostel until we find someone with a plan and tag along.” This phase was accomplished much quicker than we expected when we came across a two guys, one from Oklahoma, one from New Zealand, and they had the idea of driving to the beach for a bonfire. After the details of our plans were being created we ran into two people from the pub crawl from the night before, and they expressed interest in tagging along as well. This changed the plans a bit, because the car that was available to us only had five seats, and there were now six of us. Fortunately we had our 2-day transit pass and were determined to get our money’s worth from them and suggested we just take a bus to Pacific Beach.
The six of us walked up Fifth to the bus stop. While waiting for the bus, we ran into two lovely ladies, also staying at the hostel and they as well didn’t have an exact plan of what to do. We invited them to come with us to the beach and they accepted, much to the delight of us six guys. This brings our total to eight all of which from different places (except for Tim and myself, of course). The other members of our group were from Australia, England, New Zealand, Oklahoma, New York, and Colorado.
We continued to wait for what seemed like forever, when we came to the conclusion that the bus was never going to come and the beach was a stupid, terrible idea. We started walking aimlessly around Downtown when someone suggested we go back to the Kiwi bar from the night before. Everyone liked the environment and atmosphere so we all agreed that was a good idea. As we approached the bar, there was a man on the corner handing out coupons for $1.00 beers, thus making our good idea into the greatest idea since the scientific method. There was no band this night, which was good, this meant we didn’t have to compete on decibels and could actually have conversations with one another.
It was here that we were able to share a round of drinks and have several intimate conversations and tell jokes and stories and it was perhaps my personal favorite part of the trip. It allowed me to put down the camera for an extended period of time and actually be myself for a change instead of worrying about filming every second of what happened or keeping track of all the many expenses Tim would have, (he spent $6.00 total on beers that evening, by the way). We spent probably about 4 hours at this bar just enjoying each other’s company and once Midnight rolled around, Tim and I decided to call it a night, I guess we never did fully recover from the pub crawl the night before. We said our goodbyes and told everyone we would see them for pancakes in the morning.
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