Jason and I hadn’t been to San Diego Comic Con for a few years until this July. To be honest, we hadn’t pined for it much due to the raging current of humanity we had to ford the last couple times we attended. This year, we tried for passes without being terribly committed to the notion of going. When we acquired Sunday-only tickets the debate continued. Eventually, I pointed out that we both like San Diego and suggested Comic Con be just a paragraph in our San Diego visit. What an excellent plan! That paragraph is below.

We stayed in La Jolla for the first part of our trip. La Jolla is a charming town to walk around with lots of yummy food and cute shops. It’s even more charming when its 70-something weather is nearly 30 degrees cooler than what you left back home. We sampled as many of its culinary offerings as gastrointestinally possible via Puesta, Catania, Cove Point, and NINE-TEN.

Our wanderings went beyond satisfying our spoiled stomachs to satisfying our curiosity. We meandered on the shore from Shell Beach to the La Jolla Tide Pools searching for, you guessed it, tide pools. Predictably, we found shells at Shell Beach and tide pools at the La Jolla Tide Pools. I suppose whoever named the beaches in La Jolla had the creative capacity of a piece of carpet. At the tide pools, chiton, hermit crabs, anemones, shore crabs, mussels, limpets, little fish, and snails enjoyed their comfy homes in rock channels as we gawked from above. I find these glimpses into the workings of a watery underworld typically unseen absorbing.

We also spent some time in San Diego proper starting with Balboa Park. In all our trips to San Diego, Jason and I had never explored Balboa’s 16 museums and 1,200 acres beyond the zoo. This time, we took on a tiny fraction of what is available at Balboa through the Japanese Friendship Garden and the Museum of Photographic Arts.

The Japanese Friendship Garden is peaceful and aesthetically balanced making use of a steep ravine to create layers of living display. Its koi pond contains the biggest koi I’ve ever encountered. These “show-quality” specimens make other koi look like Goldfish crackers. Did you know that koi are a symbol of longevity because they can live over 200 years? Nope, I didn’t know that either.

Being a photographer and photography nerd, I loved the Museum of Photographic Arts. Its collections aren’t extensive, but I found the exhibits on Contemporary Photography from Australia and Hidden Worlds fascinating. The section on spirit photography, a popular form of shooting back in the 1800s expressly for capturing the images of ghosts, was particularly intriguing. You’ve got to give those photographers props for successfully tampering with negatives and using double exposures to create fraudulent phantoms over a century before Photoshop could turn fat rolls into nothing more than apparitions.

One evening after dinner, we hurried off to the Torrey Pines Natural Reserve to do a short hike on the Guy Fleming Trail. In true Sabin fashion, we finished this one right before darkness set in… with maybe a little running at the end to beat the state rangers locking up for the night… maybe.

The rest of our evenings, we spent back in La Jolla in the company of a cozy fire as waves hurled themselves onto shore boulders with crushing repetition. Those booming breakers, the sharp call of seagulls, and the grainy gusts of the ocean followed us throughout our stay in La Jolla.

For one last pre-Comic-Con outing, we visited the Maritime Museum of San Diego. The Maritime Museum contains nine boats and two submarines. Its collection of vessels is diverse and pleasing to board. The U.S.S. Dolphin, a submarine with nearly 40 years of service and the record for operating depth, was the first we embarked. I barely survived 10 minutes in its constricted passageways. I guess I can check sonar technician off my list of possible occupations. The San Salvador, the first European vessel to reach America’s West Coast, may be a giant by historical standards, but it certainly wasn’t a giant by dimensional ones. A full-size replica of this, the first Spanish galleon that sailed into San Diego in 1542, left me in awe of the big things that can happen on small boats. The Star of India is the star of the Maritime Museum. It is the oldest active merchant sailing ship in the world. It was built in 1863 and is still taken out at least once a year. In its 150 years, this craft has circumnavigated the globe over 20 times and accepted such diverse roles as carting immigrants to New Zealand, transporting lumber, and functioning as both a salmon fishing vessel and cannery. Ships ahoy!

That brings us to our San Diego Comic Con day. This year was Comic Con’s 50^th anniversary and something like our fifth time attending. Traditionally, Sunday is a bit slower day at Comic Con, but it was breaking down conventional barriers with human bodies this time. We waited in line over an hour and a half for a transporter experience, which was maybe worth the wait? I’m still not sure. Somehow, we bought a significant number of items for only having hours in the exhibit hall, like a special-edition Halloween hobbit hole and an articulated, 1:6-scale Picard action figure. It’s common knowledge that everyone needs a Halloween hobbit hole and Picard Barbie. As soon as we got back to our room, I fell asleep on the couch as determined to avoid any further human interaction as the Loch Ness Monster.

Going to San Diego for more than just the most famous comic con on the planet meant we were bombarded by the saline and sweaty nearly equally. Since I got a Picard Barbie out of it, that’s an equivalence I can live with.