Planning a summer vacation (San Diego)

School is almost out and I'm both excited about and dreading the summer break. I have 4 kids now and it makes for a full house and on normal days a bit of chaos. Having two of my kids in school at least some of the time is pretty sweet to say the least. I will love not worrying about homework and doing the whole morning routine, but my kids wake up at the crack of dawn anyways so we won't be sleeping in until all the kids are teenagers.

I've started planning our trip to San Diego, its still in its early stages but I have a pretty good idea of what we plan on doing while we are there. My little brother moved to San Diego several months ago so we plan on visiting him and getting in some quality time with the ocean to last us a couple more years.

We will be driving because flying is the cost of a small child when you have six people in your family. I'm hoping to break up the trip and maybe drive a couple hours into the night to Cedar City and stay at a hotel and wake up to finish the trip from there. Its a total of 12 hrs and 23 minutes to San Diego from Brigham City, and that's a looooong time to be in a car with children. (thank heavens for electronics).

I've been looking up fun places to visit besides the ocean while we are there and this is the list of places that I think we will try to visit on our trip.

• Living Coast Discovery Center - it has a turtle lagoon, shark and stingray exhibits, and nature trails. Its $14 for Adults, $9 for kids 4+ and free for 0-3.
• Cabrillo National Monument (Point Loma National Park)- it has tide pools, whale watching and a light house. $5 for a Day parking pass.
• Reuben H Fleet Science Center- basically an interactive science museum with an I-Max movie dome. To get in and also see a show it is $17 for adults and $14 for kids.

As you can see I don't plan on going to the typical amusement parks with my kids yet. I think that Lagoon this summer will be enough and the crowds at the big name places would not mix well with my wandering, hard of listening children. The ocean and a couple learning centers will be enough fun for us this year.

If you've been there or lived there and have any suggestions I would love to hear them, we wont be leaving for a couple months and I'm going pretty blindly.