Cali

Well, here we are a month later and I'm finally getting around to posting about our honeymoon in California. Disclaimer: our highlights are only based on our brief (but wonderful) trip and I am in no way a west coast expert. There are many things that we didn't get to see, and if I offend anyone with our recommendations and experiences....sorry I'm not sorry.

Let's start with our time in Coronado/San Diego. We knew we wanted to stay visit San Diego, and I'd only heard wonderful things about Coronado, a little beach (and military) town right across the bay. When we started researching places to lodge, we decided that it would be nice to be off the beaten downtown track, but we would rent a car since we did want to do a lot of exploring. We ended up booking at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort, which was incredible. My parents have always been more urban vacationers, so we never really stayed at resorts. I think we've been missing out!

The resort was huge, and beyond that it was clean, there weren't a ton of kids, and the staff was SO friendly. There were four different restaurants/cafes inside, all of which were delicious and offered a variety of yummy food - a lot of which was healthy. There was an incredible open air bar in the lobby, with a patio that had fire pits and lounge chairs that looked out onto downtown San Diego. The pool area was huge, and it never felt overcrowded (granted, we were there Wednesday-Sunday, so the weekdays were definitely quieter). Silver Strand beach was right across the main road outside of the resort, and Loews offered rides over on the golf carts (sidenote: on one of our trips over there, the family that was with us was from McLean! Small world.). Even though the water was freezing and it was pretty windy at the beach, it was still nice to soak up some rays with the waves crashing in front of us. Other highlights of our stay there: the spa (I had a vichy shower treatment, where they scrub you with an exfoliator and then have a multi-headed shower type thing that they shower you off with while laying down, and then you go to the massage....heaven), the poolside snacks that they brought around to you, the rentals (we did SUPing and even though I was bored after a few minutes, CP had more fun with it....he also got me on a BIKE!), and the gardens that were all over the property.

I'm already looking into the other Loews resorts, and would certainly stay at one again.

There was a citrus garden outside our room with lemons, oranges, and kumquats

It was pretty chilly at night by the pool

Next up, more exciting things that we did in SD....