Day 56: Last Day in California

All photos of Day 5 in San Diego available on Flickr.

As indicated by the title of this blog, today was our 14th and final full day in California. San Diego has definitely salvaged my opinion of this state. It was nice to not have to do a lot of driving for the past 10 days (and I'm sure Old Yeller appreciated that as well), but I know that Erik is anxious to get back on the road and starting snapping shots of state welcome signs again.

After saying goodbye to our awesome hotel and dropping Mary off at the airport, Erik and I took care of some very important business - repairing our Habitat donation box, which we have dubbed "Roxy Boxy." After 8 weeks of being shoved, stuffed, crammed, and blown over repeatedly, she got a much needed rehabilitating packing tape job to keep it together for the remainder of the tour. It has certainly made it much longer than we thought it would, and I for sure thought we'd be using tin cups by this point. After repairing Boxy, we headed for one of the few areas we haven't seen of the city yet, Little Italy. Just about every major city has a Chinatown and/or a Little Italy and this one was really no different. We had some really good pie at a local pizzeria and then headed towards the stadium to a sports bar to watch FOX Saturday baseball and Little League World Series. We decided to attend another Padres game so that we could fundraise and get a souvenir tote bag, which was the sweet giveaway on this particular evening. The game was sold out because of the giveaway, and because it was originally slated to be an Oswalt v. Peavy duel on the mound, but the Padres ended up putting Justin Germano on the hill instead. Our seats were for the GA lawn section in center field, but we ended up sitting near where we sat on Wednesday in the upper deck after watching an inning from the roof of the Western Metal Supply Company building. Once again, the Friars could not muster much offense and lost 3-2. The only reason they scored any runs at all was because they hit up Roy Oswalt before his exit in the 5th after he had clearly injured himself earlier in the inning. Roy O helped himself out with his first RBI of the season and Ty Wigginton had 2 hits in the win for the Astros.

One thing that was cemented after attending our second game at PETCO was how horrible Padres fans are, which is a major contributing factor as to why Erik hates the park. Not "horrible" in the traditional sense of the word like Cubs or Phillies fans, but "horrible" as in very indifferent and uninformed. Padres fans come to the game from the 3rd to the 7th, don't watch any of the game, and get very angry if one is not sitting in their assigned seat. Aside from the two games we watched, the Pads have a pretty decent team, but I doubt anybody in San Diego is aware of this. After the game we drove about two hours and stopped at a rest stop for the night, just west of the Arizona border. Tomorrow we complete the drive to Scottsdale to stay with a friend of the family of Erik's before seeing the Brew Crew battle the D-Backs in Phoenix on Monday.