Traveling With Kids – San Diego – Balboa Park

Our Secret Spy

Truth time. The Prettiest-girl-in-the-world had a spy down in San Diego. To protect his identity, let’s call him Schmennis. He‘d gave us advice on where to look for a good Mexican restaurant. He’d given us advice on driving times and things to see, things to do, and things to avoid. He given advice on the weather, clothes to wear and a place the Prettiest-girl-in-the-world could do some shopping.

So, after we had visited the gorillas again, (no sign of the baby), after we had done the gorilla stance, after we had eaten terrible hamburgers while the red-eyed bird kept its eye on the oldest, after we had fed a few ducks, bought a few souvenirs, tried to find popsicles and failed, after we’d bought gorilla t-shirts for the boys, it was on his advice that we went to our next destination.

Balboa park. The park of about a billion museums. Ok, that’s not entirely true, but the park is HUGE!  It has the San Diego Air & Space Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, the San Diego Automotive Museum, the San Diego Hall of Champions, the Centro Cultural de la Raza (whatever the heck that is), the Museum of the Living Arts, the San Diego Museum of Man, (not to be confused with the San Diego Natural History Museum), the San Diego Model Railroad Museum (oh my, the geek in me got all tinglie inside), the Mingei (What?) International Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center (for little kids), the Timken Museum of Art, the Veterans Museum and Memorial Center, the George W. Marston House and the San Diego History Center.

Whew, right?

Plus there were gardens and green parks and merry-go-rounds and the San Diego Zoo and dogs.

It’s the neat thing about not having a hard and fast schedule. We could do a whole ton of things with our free time. So, we’d researched some options the night before and presented the incredible findings to the boys. The Air and Space Museum had a Ripley’s Believe it Or Not exhibition!!!!

Unlike the epic fail of Universal Studios, this suggestion made the younger one hoot, and the older one smile, just a bit at first, but then he couldn’t contain himself and got all bouncy and excited like his younger brother.

Now you have to understand. The boys, the oldest in particular, has a bookcase full of books about odd things, weird things, smelly things, dead things, and sharks.

Seeing a real life exhibit by Ripley would pretty much hit most of those things. It would so awesome, like the Prettiest-girl-in-the-world eating chocolate with Johnny Depp or me having the abs of one of those 300 Spartan guys.

So, off we drove.

But our guru had not told us what to expect when we arrived there. It was way better than we even imagined.