So I had a bad hair day today. I washed it with whatever random shampoo was dug up around the house, I went to bed with it wet because it was 11:45 at night instead of annoying everyone with blowdrying it, and the next morning it was mushrooming. Mom curled it with her portable curlers, but that did no good and basically I looked like a dandelion all day. I didn’t super fucking care too much since I was spending the day with total strangers while on vacation in an area I don’t live in, but hooooooo boy was she bothered, enough to insist on finding a CVS to get hair products in.

Mom got some kind of “go pass” thing SD offers where you can go to as many things as you can squeeze into in a day, so we went to Balboa Park and did that. (Note that this worked a lot better here than in Legoland.) I thought this was not going to go so well since Mom is normally slow as shit in any museum, but thankfully, all of these places turned out to be fairly small so we got through each fairly quickly and still had time for a fancy lunch at the Prado in the middle. So we covered the following:

Air and Space Museum: Mostly air rather than space and I think I wanted more space and less air. They have a lot of WWI and WWII plane stuff, though there was a space section that I enjoyed, and some “4D” movies (this is a thing in SD, Legoland did that too). Lots of portraits from the Air and Space Hall of Fame there. In there around 2 hours.

Automotive Museum: Better and shorter than I expected. Has a few super weird cars that made it worth seeing, such as a customized car that has a shit ton of skulls added to it and Louie Mattar’s Fabulous Car, which is goddamned amazing. Sometime I want to go to a car museum that is just art cars. In there for about 45 minutes.

Model Railroad Museum: Most of this was large but dull, or at least they had a lot of landscaping but not much in the way of buildings, trains, etc. However, one room in the back was well decorated, decorated in fun ways, and clearly had a lot of fun folks working on that room and that was excellent. Worth seeing even if the rest was full. In there for about a half hour.

Fleet Science Center: This is like a smaller version of the Exploratorium. It had some adults-only stuff on top. Both uh, boring adult shit I was not into and then they had a “fun stuff for adults” section that had some fun stuff for adults and some stuff that was still clearly kid-only (which is to say I’m annoyed I couldn’t go in the ball pit). Some exhibits Mom and I could not get to work so who knows what was going on there. In there around two hours, the last hour of it being a movie. The best part was their dome movie theater, in which we watched “Superhero Dogs,” a movie narrated by Chris Evans (and plugging Marvel, obviously) about rescue dogs. Included the following moments:

(a) We follow a woman named Kat as she picks out a dog. The narration is basically all, “Yes, her name’s Kat. That actually happened and is not a joke.”
(b) Kat says she wants a female dog, she doesn’t know why...actually yeah, she does know why, it’s because male dogs pee all over everything.

Since we figured it’d take forever to get home--it’s around an hour-ish to get down to SD or Carlsbad in the morning and over 2 hours to get home in the afternoon the last few days--we ended up eating at Food Truck Friday there. Mom got sliders, I got lumpia and chiccarones (Mom hates those but too bad) and later, gelato. They had a lot of exotic trucks, so that was fun.

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