La Jolla

Yesterday, our last full day in San Diego, we headed out to La Jolla (pron. La Hoya). Pictured above is the tiny swimming beach, in the background, with groups of cormorants and pelicans on the cliffs in the foreground. It's a very pretty beachy suburb, with lots of wildlife to make things interesting. Here's a couple of hot pelicans. I don't know if you can see, but the one on the right was flapping his neck to cool himself off.

There are also lots of shops and restaurants, mostly in quite old buildings, and the area has a real seaside feel. Emi commented that it reminded her of home.

There are lots of caves in the cliffs. Some enterprising soul hand dug (or so the story goes) a tunnel from The Cave Shop, which seems to be a kind of tea room, down to one of the caves just above sea level. We decided to pay our money and have a go. The staircase was pretty steep and the steps were wet and a bit slippery but we descended without incident. The tunnel seems to have been dug through sandstone, which didn't fill me with confidence, but it has been standing for many years now.

The view from the cave at the bottom was nice, but the climb back up was pretty strenuous.

We packed up two boxes of unneeded clothes and shoes (and Al's books) and mailed them to ourselves in France this morning, to lighten our luggage a bit. After that we drove up to Los Angeles this afternoon and are now at a hotel near the airport, ready for our early flight to Mexico tomorrow. We don't have more than a few words of Spanish between us, so finding our way around might be interesting.