San Diego Surprise

Not so long ago, when Hubby Tony and I wanted to visit our kids and grandchildren in California it was just a matter of coordinating schedules with the adults. Now that the grands are in school it's added another level of complexity. On this trip we decided to plan long weekend visits with each family and take some time for ourselves during the week in between.

On Monday morning we said goodbye to Son Tony and his family in Modesto and drove back to the San Jose airport. We dropped off the rental car and boarded a flight to San Diego, where we stayed for three nights.

Our home in the city was the recently-renovated Beau Hotel, right in the middle of the Gaslamp Quarter area. Al Capone was rumored to have hosted secret poker games there during the Prohibition era. The building was filled with beautiful old woodwork and exposed brick, especially in the restaurant area.

The Beau Hotel

During our visit we did a lot of walking, did some window shopping, and took a boat tour of the San Diego bay. We used our rental car to go to Mission San Diego de Alcalá (California's first mission founded in 1769), Old Town San Diego (the first European settlement in California), and the Little Italy neighborhood.

But our most unusual activity wasn't even on the list of things to do.

Over breakfast the first morning we started talking to a woman who was in the city for a specialty food trade show at the convention center. The woman owned a company on the East Coast which sold to military installations. She had come to the show to network, but it was the last day and she was headed to the airport to go home. She asked if we would like to have her entrance badges, saying that she paid the entrance fee and could give them to whoever she wanted.

Tony and I decided that it would be fun and interesting, and definitely fit in with my goal to do unique and different things. We left the dining room with the badges, the woman's contact information, and an invitation to contact us to go out to dinner the next time she was in our area. She said that if anyone should question us we just had to say we were her friends.

Shortly before the show opened we followed the crowd converging on the convention center.  We were a little apprehensive getting our badges scanned, but no one said anything. The event stretched out over multiple exhibition halls. Tony and I were there for about 2 hours, but only made a dent in the more than 1,000 brands represented. Each booth showcased a company's products to others in the industry. We sampled so much (cheeses, meats, snacks, and sweets) that we were able to skip lunch. And when we left we both had a full tote bag of samples.

Our combined loot

Over the next two days we ate some of the samples, gave some away, and packed the rest in our suitcases when we left to go back to San Jose for our visit with Son Brian's family.