March 2025 – StewsCat

I used to work and live in the San Diego region for a year about 15 years ago. A former colleague of mine let me know she was retiring and moving away and so we decided to head down for a few days to see her and just enjoy San Diego. Unfortunately we have been on the mend from our first bout with COVID so weren’t 100%. At least I was no longer shedding so I felt okay still visiting. After moving back to southern CA last year, it’s a relatively short drive down to SD. We left on a Sunday morning making the drive that much easier without any traffic. Our AirBnB wouldn’t be ready to check in until the afternoon so we headed straight for Pacific Beach (PB) to get some lunch.

We haven’t been down to the area in probably 10 years now so I had done some research on food places. We settled on the Pacific Beach Fish Shop. This place is unique in that you choose the fish and then the means of getting it into your mouth (taco, salad, sandwich, plate). D had two of their pre-made recipe tacos: TKO Taco (Mahi Mahi) & Pineapple Express taco (Mahi Mahi) while I had their fresh catches of the day: Halibut taco & Rockfish taco. Overall I think they were tasty though one of D’s fish was kinda dry and there wasn’t any sauce on that one. We grabbed some coffee two doors down at Elixir Espresso Bar.

We then made our way over to the actual beach in Pacific Beach (we tend to go towards Law Street Beach). It had rained very briefly while we were getting coffee but cleared up by the time we made our way to the beach, though it was still quite windy so we didn’t stay too long.

Last month we made the trek to Houston for my cousin’s wedding. This turned out to also be a huge family reunion of sorts since all the cousins were converging for the family event. I hadn’t seen a couple of cousins in maybe 10+ years?

We flew into Houston early on a Saturday morning as the wedding reception was later in the day on Saturday. We also happened to fly out with both my sisters and one of the nephews. After arriving, my sister had rented a car and we drove the 40 ish minutes towards our hotel. On the way we wanted to grab some food for a late lunch (turned out to be prescient as they ended up not serving dinner until a bit later into the reception). I had a couple of cuisines that I wanted to try while in Houston: BBQ, TexMex, Vietnamese food.

We stopped at Lopez Mexican Restaurant, since it was on our way to the hotel and we were a bit pressed for time to get changed and get to the reception. Here I was able to try Chile con queso (shared with everyone), and then I tried their Ocampo (Two cheese enchiladas, a beef taco guacamole salad, and a chile con queso puff). Being from CA, I wasn’t looking for authentic Mexican food but wanted to try some true Tex-Mex so was happy we were able to try this.

After checking into the hotel, we rapidly changed and then headed over to the reception at Lam Bo Ballroom. This was a mixed Vietnamese-Chinese wedding (which actually was pretty similar). There was a very elaborate (and loud) dragon dance to start things off. And then instead of starting with food, they started with some speeches as well as some dances. While this was happening, they did start to bring out some food. Prior to all this, there was a cocktail and Hors d’Ouevres hour. We had adjusted our seating so we could hang out with some of the cousins that we haven’t seen in a long time so it was overall a good time. It was hard to speak too much though because the sound volume was very high with the speeches and music.