San Diego

We spent the long weekend in southern California.  It was so nice to get away from the heat.  San Diego was beautiful!  The kids enjoyed seeing LegoLand (twice) and spending a day on the beach. 

We stayed on Camp Pendleton in a very small TLF.  I think I mentioned before about our service envy.  It didn't last long.  Yes, we were near the beach.  Yes, it was a lot cheaper than renting a house for a few days.  But this was by far the worse TLF we had stayed in since being in the middle east. 
At other AF lodging facilities, there is a laundry room where you don't have to pay for using the washer/dryer machines.  We had to pay $1 for a small load of wash and another $1 for the dryer.  Thank goodness I brought our own laundry detergent and dryer sheets.  That would have cost us even more. 
At other AF TLF's we've stayed in there is at least one separate bedroom for some kind of privacy.  Not so where we stayed.  It was all one big room crammed with 2 queen beds, and a twin added in at the end of the two beds (we requested a cot for one of our kids).  They advertised a kitchenette but there was only a stove top and no oven.  No baking dishes other than the 2 pots- one large and one small.

It wasn't all bad.  We were close to LegoLand, right near the beach, access to a commissary, church wasn't far, and it was a nice drive to downtown San Diego and the airport. 

We picked up our oldest child at the airport on Sunday and spent the afternoon driving around- there was a brand new Navy Destroyer in the port that was just built in Mississippi and traveled through the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal to it's home port of San Diego.  We drove on to the Naval Station and drove by all the cool Navy ships, saw where the SEALs train on Coronado, and stopped by to see the San Diego Mormon Temple.

We also stopped in the Old Town Sand Diego and walked around the old Victorian houses and visited the Mormon Battalion Visitor Center.