You deserve a break in June

We're well over four years into the relationship now, so it's about time that Alma and I finally took our first true vacation together. We're heading out to San Diego in the first week of June, and I could not be more excited. For one thing, we're going from Sunday to Friday, so I'm actually taking an entire week off of work, something I really could not have done at any point prior to now. For another, we're going while the Cubs are there (okay, this wasn't a coincidence) and seeing them twice. For a third, San Diego seems like a pretty cool place to visit. For a fourth, it's me and Alma with four full days (and bits of two more) all to ourselves.

Of course we've been on trips before - Austin and New Orleans in 2006, San Francisco in 2007, a couple trips out to DC, etc - but they've always been in service of something else, like quiz bowl or psychology conferences, and they've never been this long or really by ourselves. If I'm not totally overlooking something, the last true vacation I went on - i.e. the last trip with absolutely no other purpose than to travel somewhere and do things there (not seeing family, no quiz bowl, no conference, no student ambassadorship), and that lasted longer than like one day - was the Flaxman family trip to England and Scotland in August of 1994, so long ago that I was still retardedly writing first sentences (and no more) of great unfinished novels in otherwise blank notebooks. I had not yet turned 12. We are rapidly approaching this having been fifteen years ago. Of course I gerrymandered those qualifications pretty severely, but you get what I'm saying.

Possible items on the itinerary aside from the two Cubs games: harbor cruise, trip to the botanic gardens, trip to Torrey Pines State Reserve, exploration of various architecturally interesting city neighborhoods, etc. (If, by some chance, someone who's been to San Diego or has spent any time there is reading this, feel free to suggest something.) It should be a pretty full four days, or at least I'd like it to be, but hopefully we'll time it so it'll be full in a fun way and not in any kind of exhausting way. I suppose it's always tough to walk that line between "vacation = relaxation" and "we should be out seeing stuff," but I'll feel like an asshole if I'm sleeping all day like I did one of the days in New Orleans. The two-hour time difference might help me get up early (although it probably means I'll be totally wiped by 10 pm every night).

I have to be wary of looking too far ahead, though. In between now and June 1, I still have to move everything I own up to Evanston and finish my first semester of classes at Roosevelt. We're not out of the woods yet.